Transgermania. Il superamento del monolinguismo nella letteratura tedesca contemporanea

The main aim of this study is to analyse the literary implications of multilingualism and ‘plural’ cultural identity: a long-standing phenomenon in German society. Multilingualism, in the writers analysed, often implies a metalinguistic reflection: on the one hand, the comparison of languages brings out irreducible differences and the impossibility of establishing equivalences; on the other hand, however, the same comparison shows that the coexistence of different linguistic sensitivities in the same text is possible, in a perspective that is defined as translinguistic. The main part of the work analyses the multilingual literary corpus of reference: authors of Jewish origin writing in German, who arrived in Germany in the years immediately following the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The transcultural ‘galaxy’ to which they belong has been given the symbolic name ‘Transgermania’. In particular, we focus on the works of Katja Petrowskaja, Lena Gorelik, Olga Grjasnowa and Sasha Marianna Salzmann. The linguistic perspective is embedded in a broader analysis of the socio-cultural context of the texts analysed. Central to the analysis are the reworking of the emigration experience, the relationship with Judaism - particularly from a female perspective - and the approaches of different generations to the theme of plural identity.