ABSTRACT

This chapter explores metaphors of multilingualism that question the territorial notion of a stable, circumscribed national language by emphasizing openness, plurality, instability, and centrifugal tendencies. The overall narrative leads from Franz Kafka’s talk on Yiddish and his notion of ‘small literatures’, to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of deterritorialization, Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the centrifugal forces of heteroglossia and Erich Auerbach’s observations on the merging of styles and genres. The main emphasis is on conceptual and terminological analogies and the possibilities of an alternative discourse on multilingualism that has received little attention so far. The chapter also provides a close reading of Bakhtin’s notions of polyglossia and heteroglossia with a focus on their spatial dimension and their relevance as metaphors of multilingualism.