Resisting Linguistic Rules in French-Australian Writing

Abstract

Recent scholarship has posited the experience of migration as a source of creative, experimental possibilities that allow writers to contest fixed forms of identity; it has also questioned monolingual, monocultural understandings of national literatures that yoke one language to one nation. Building on such work, this article considers French migrant writing that breaks linguistic rules and challenges the norms of national literatures by analyzing various attitudes testifying to multilingualism and linguistic differences in the works of Paul Wenz, Didier Coste and Catherine Rey—authors who had embarked upon their writing careers before migrating, who have settled in Australia and who write from a position of stability and permanence. While travel writers use English to nuance their texts about journeys through Anglophone regions, they ultimately do not displace the primary importance of French in their texts. By contrast, the texts of the writers considered herein articulate both unique understandings of linguistic identity and resistance to linguistic fixity as well as innovative narrative strategies to communicate both.