study reveals that the central motivation behind this phenomenon was not simply practical but also tied up with what the women consistently articulated as “desire” and “longing” (akogare) for a different female existence: “the turn to the foreign has become perhaps the most important means currently at women’s disposal to resist gendered expectations of the female life course in Japan” (Women on the Verge 2) (165)
Kelsky argues that the “liberatory potential of the West,” as these women define it, “is intertwined with desire for the white man as fetish object of moder- nity” (Women on the Verge 4)
more enlightened, less sexist Western masculinity
This female machine which gave me the gift of language I called a language mother. I could only write the signs which she already carried in and on herself, that is, writing for me meant nothing but repeating her, but that way I could be adopted by the new language. (12–13) (172)
rediscovering the world for a second time through being adopted by a new language mother
In the mother tongue words are attached to people so that one cannot playfully enjoy language. There, thoughts cling so closely to words that neither the former nor the latter can fly freely. In a foreign language, however, one has something like a staple remover: it removes all the things that are attached to each other and cling to one another. (15) (177)
Instead of uniqueness, the machine-body offers endless repetition and mechanical reproducibility of language.
“When one has a new language mother, one can experience a second childhood”
she uses bilingualism as a literary strategy of detachment from any language’s claim on the subject, rather than as a basis for a claim to double belonging.
monolingual paradigm-rising in the 18th century
Like many forms of multilingualism, writing in two or more languages was more common prior to the rise of the monolingual paradigm. In seventeenth-century Europe, for instance, it was common for the small literate elite to be polyglot and to write at times in Latin, and at times in Dutch, Italian, French, or German. The choice of language was primarily guided by the topic at hand, as some languages were considered more appropriate for some topics than others, such as Latin for sciences, and Italian for love poetry. A framework in which aesthetic and generic criteria included a consideration of appropriate language thus fostered the production of oeuvres in multiple languages. The monolingual paradigm arising in the eighteenth century gradually, but radically, changed this framework and put the— assumedly singular—native language and ethno-national identity of the writer into the forefront, until it became unimaginable for many to write in anything but their ‘mother tongue’.
he did not change languages because he had changed places but, rather, that he changed places in order to be able to change languages [ . . . ]. In France and in French, Beckett is not expected to belong completely. This is why he is more “at home” there—that is, nowhere.[162]Alien Tongues?
‘mother’ tongue – describes singularity and asserts a sort of naturalism and material authority
‘second childhood’
mother tongue absorbed with mother’s milk’, lacks childhood
altering the perception of words and languages
to be read as signs of authenticity, origin, and uniqueness, their origin lies elsewhere-namely, in translation. They are literal translations of the Latin lingua materna, which initially referred to the vernaculars over against the learned language Latin.“Mother tongue” is thus, ironically, always already a translated concept. [197]