Previous Mellon Collaborative Fellowship

Bilingual Knowledge/Bilingual Stories

Palestinian-Israeli novelist, columnist, and TV-writer Sayed Kashua, Anastasia Giannakidou (University of Chicago, Linguistics), and Na’ama Rokem (University of Chicago, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations) explored the possibilities and limits of bilingualism in a project that generated a crossover between different methods of engaging the question: “What do bilinguals know?” 

There are multiple answers to this question, from multiple disciplinary points of view. Syntacticians compare the representation of implicit knowledge of grammar in the minds of native speakers of two languages in contrast with speakers of one. Psycholinguists study the specificities of language acquisition in bilingual environments. Experimentalist cognitive psychologists have shown that bilinguals possess cognitive skills that distinguish them from monolinguals, for example, in the field designated as executive function. In other words, they show that bilinguals know how to navigate an excess of information and prioritize tasks. Sociolinguists and cultural anthropologists investigate the forms of social knowledge that allow bilinguals to effectively and appropriately code-switch and mix languages in conversation and instruct them on when to avoid doing so. Literature offers more answers still. Texts that mix languages or thematize bilingualism and language mixture tell stories about lives lived between languages and what becomes known in them. And literary scholars who read these texts account for this knowledge and the forms of literary expression through which it is represented. 

This collaboration brought together a novelist, a linguist, and a literary scholar in order to create a crossover between different ways of asking the question what bilinguals know and to reflect on the methods employed in answering it. 

When Sayed Kashua—a Palestinian Israeli author whose novels, journalism, and TV writing all inhabit the uncomfortable space between his two languages, Hebrew and Arabic—visited the University of Chicago in Fall 2014, he participated in a discussion about the poetics and the politics of bilingualism. Describing his current writing project, he said: “If I could, I would write a bilingual novel in Hebrew and Arabic. But that, of course, is impossible.” Our collaboration takes as its point of departure the question: is it really impossible? What would it mean to write such a novel? How would one translate it into Hebrew or Arabic? Or into English? To what extent can such a literary experiment build on the empirical knowledge that different disciplines have accumulated about bilingualism? And what can such a novel, in its turn, contribute to this accumulation of knowledge? And if indeed writing such a bilingual novel (in these languages, at this moment in time) were impossible, what would that teach us? 

Kashua, Giannakidou, and Rokem began their conversation by reading selections from the different fields of scholarship mentioned above—linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, poetics, literary history, literary theory – and with their diverse perspectives and expertise, “translated” them for one another. The term translation (with or without scare-quotes) was crucial to setting up this conversation. Such a discussion of bilingualism would, in theory, facilitate its own form of disciplinary and artistic bilingualism (or multilingualism) and create its own forms of bi- (or multi-) lingual knowledge. As they trained themselves to become bilinguals in this sense, they began to mix languages and switch codes. Their questions then became: how would a novelist design a psychological experiment with bilingual children or adults? Can the linguist incorporate bilingual poetry into her syntactic analysis? Can we find shared themes/patterns/questions across the different modes of inquiry? And what do they mean? 

Course

Dimensions of Bilingualism  
Spring 2015  
Linguistics (43050) and cross-listed in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (43050), Creative Writing (31506) and Comparative Literature (43050).   
Monday, 1:30-4:20p, Logan Center for the Arts, 801 

Course description: 
This course/writing workshop on bilingualism will be co-taught by Na’ama Rokem (Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations), Anastasia Giannakidou (Linguistics), and Visiting Fellow Sayed Kashua (novelist).  

Studying bilingualism has broad implications for our understanding of language, cognition, and culture, and has the potential to (at least partly) redefine the disciplines that study it.  In this class, we study aspects of the bilingual experience, with emphasis on linguistic, cognitive, and socio-cultural implications of bilingualism, including artistic expression. Our goal is to understand bilingualism and code switching as a multi-dimensional phenomenon, and familiarize ourselves with numerous tools to study it. We raise the central questions of how languages co-exist in the mind, in speech, and in (popular) culture. We study phenomena such as code-switching and code mixing, second language learning, the bilingual conceptual organization, the relation between bilingualism and thought, and the impact of bilingualism on cognitive processes such as decision making, executive control. We also discuss how bilingualism is perceived in creative processes and literary texts, and what the impact of bilingualism is in the self-perception and emotions of individuals and social groups.  

Fellows

ANASTASIA GIANNAKIDOU 

Anastasia Giannakidou is Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Humanities Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago. Giannakidou is particularly interested in studying variation and diversity across languages. Her main language of study is Modern Greek; and she has done comparative work on German, Dutch, Spanish, Basque, Korean, and Mandarin Chinese, and has worked on diachronic syntax and semantics. She is the author of numerous articles and books including Polarity Sensitivity as Nonveridical Dependency, Definiteness and Nominalization, Mood, Tense, Aspect revisited. Anastasia is presently working on a book entitled Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought, forthcoming with University of Chicago Press.

SAYED KASHUA

Palestinian-Israeli novelist Sayed Kashua has written three best-selling novels (all three of which have been translated into English). He is the author of a very popular weekly column for Haaretz newspaper, the creator of an award-winning prime-time TV series (Arab Labor), and wrote the screenplay the feature film A Borrowed Identity (2014) and the novel on which the film Let it Be Morning (2021) is based.

NA’AMA ROKEM

Na’ama Rokem is Associate Professor, Comparative Literature & Middle Eastern Studies; and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature. Rokem works on Modern Hebrew and German-Jewish literature. Her first book, Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and Spaces of Zionist Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2013) argues that prose, as a figure of thought, a mode and a medium, played an instrumental role in the literary foundations of the Zionist revolution. She is now writing a book about the encounter between Paul Celan and Yehuda Amichai, as well as articles on multilingualism and translation in the works of Hannah Arendt and Leah Goldberg, on the politics of translation in Israel. With Amir Eshel, she coedited a special issue of Prooftexts, on German-Hebrew relations. Rokem is the organizer of two international conferences at the University of Chicago: “German and Hebrew: Histories of a Conversation,” and “German-Jewish Echoes in the Middle East.”