Submission deadline: September 30, 2026
Plurilinguisme littéraire is an international, interdisciplinary, open-access annual journal published digitally. It is devoted to the study of literary writing, creative practices, and the circulation of works shaped by the use of multiple languages. It also provides a space for the theoretical, critical, and methodological frameworks needed to analyse such texts.
- The journal welcomes contributions from literary studies, linguistics, translation studies, genetic criticism, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive sciences, and language and literature pedagogy, provided that they address literary creativity under conditions of linguistic diversity.
- It publishes articles in six languages: French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Submissions undergo double-blind peer review. Online publication is free of charge and fully open access on the publisher’s platform.
The thematic dossier for the journal’s second issue, “Multilingual Self-Writing and Intertextuality” examines the functions, forms, and limits of intertextuality in texts that narrate a life between languages: autobiographies, memoirs, autofiction, self-reflexive and autotheoretical essays, and narratives of language learning, family inheritance, exile, and migration.
In multilingual self-writing, intertextuality is neither merely a network of learned references nor an ornamental device. Rather, it becomes a means through which subjectivity, legitimacy, affiliation and, at times, disaffiliation are constructed. The relation to the self is shaped not only through the narration of an individual trajectory between languages, but also through engagement with other traditions of reading and models of writing.
Building on work devoted to the literary representation of the multilingual subject (Kramsch 2004; Ausoni 2018; Grell-Borgomano and Devésa 2019), this special issue proposes to broaden the theoretical framework of language memoirs (Kaplan 1994; Kramsch 2009; Kellman 2019) toward a more open understanding of autobiographical writing between languages. In doing so, it aims to encompass literary forms, intertextual relationships, and translational practices alike.
Prospective corpora may include texts that:
– are written in a late-acquired, deliberately chosen, inherited, imposed, lost-and-regained language, or one elevated to the status of a sole literary tongue;
– stage several languages without necessarily inscribing them all in the textual fabric through written, literary code-switching;
– reflect on the conditions of language acquisition, loss, transmission, or translation, as well as the texts of other authors;
– construct a literary genealogy through practices of reading, quotation, translation, or scenes of mediation between several linguistic traditions;
– negotiate power dynamics between dominant and minoritized, colonial and postcolonial, institutional, familial, migrant, or diasporic languages.
The corpora may range from language memoirs explicitly centring on language acquisition and learning — such as Alice Kaplan’s French Lessons, Jhumpa Lahiri’s In altre parole, Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation, or Akira Mizubayashi’s Une langue venue d’ailleurs — to more hybrid forms, such as Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Mutterzunge, Andreï Makine’s Le Testament français, or Nancy Huston’s Nord perdu. Contributions may also consider texts in which multilingual experience shapes the narrative voice, cultural memory, or inherently multilingual models of literary validation.
Thematic dossier edited by Louise Sampagnay (CEREG, Sorbonne Nouvelle University) and Dirk Weissmann (CREG, University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès / ITEM)
For the full text of the CfP including possible approaches (in 6 languages) please follow: https://calenda.org/1421792