Yoko Tawada
R470.00
In this playful and daring interrogation of language, the globally acclaimed Yoko Tawada reveals the poetics, politics and potential of existing outside one’s mother tongue. From Senegalese writers discarding colonial-enforced French to the increasing use of loan words in her native Japanese, Tawada deconstructs the ways in which the world shapes and is shaped by languages: their hidden systems of power, their sweeping histories and, ultimately, the people who claim, reject, adapt or romanticise them.
In stock
Exophony
Tawada famously writes in both Japanese and German, but her interest in language reaches beyond any mere dichotomy. The term “exophonic,” which she first heard in Senegal, has a special allure for the author: “I was already familiar with similar terms, ‘immigrant literature,’ or ‘creole literature,’ but ‘exophonic’ had a much broader meaning, referring to the general experience of existing outside of one’s mother tongue.”
Tawada revels in explorations of cross-cultural and intra-language possibilities (and along the way deals several nice sharp raps to the primacy of English). The accent here, as in her fiction, is the art of drawing closer to the world through defamiliarization. Never entertaining a received thought, Tawada seeks the still-to-be-discovered truths, as well as what might possibly be invented entirely whole cloth. Exophony opens a new vista into Yoko Tawada’s world, and delivers more of her signature erudite wit.
| Product Details | Paperback |
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