The Influence of border spaces on linguistic and bodily experience in Irena Brežná’s novel Nevďačná cudzinka (The Thankless Foreigner)

Abstract

The growing need for community interpreting as a consequence of globalization is reconfiguring the spaces of the interpreting act in which people with different cultural, social, and political-historical backgrounds come together. These places are characterized by Foucaultian liminality and heterotopia. Using the concept of linguistic biography, the sociolinguistic concept of the linguistic repertoire (John J. Gumperz), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the phenomenology of the body, it traces the way these spaces affect bodily and linguistic experiences of community interpreting participants as multilingual asylum seekers in their encounters with monolingual institutions in the novel The Thankless Foreigner by the German-Swiss author Irena Brežná (b. 1950). It also looks at interpreters subjected to the pressures of different existential situations that arise from the nature of these facilities. The article explores linguistic ideologies determining the behaviour of participants in these proceedings and the way language in a literary text expresses or reflects ideas, values or beliefs associated with a particular language or linguistic variant.

Keywords

• irena brežná
• community interpreting
• heterotopia
• space
• linguistic repertoire
• linguistic and bodily experience
• language ideologies