Fellows


Bettine Menke
ifk Senior Fellow


Duration of fellowship
01. March 2020 bis 30. June 2020

On Babble: The Many Languages in the Language I Speak or Write



PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Putting the multilingualism of the language that I speak and write into perspective allows for the subversion of the notion of languages (and their territorialism) as closed and homogeneous, as well as the subversion of traditional models of translation. This is because the inherent multiplicity within one language is untranslatable, with any traditional translation into one language inevitably omitting it. Conversely, translation can turn the language presumed to be one’s own into something other, something foreign. The promotion of this notion is a matter of urgency, today more than ever, because so many write and speak a language that is not one’s or their own: minorities, migrants, minor languages, languages-in-the-making. Such linguistic situations can be turned into productive strategies for articulation and writing (by Kafka, Celan, Joyce, Derrida, Cixous, Tawada). Unaccountable multilingualism encounters the non-closed, the nomadic: Yiddish, “Mauscheln,” pidgin, which—in the interest of constructing national languages—have been dismissed as mishmash-languages or no languages at all, as no-one’s mother tongues, mere babble.



CV

Bettine Menke has been Professor of General and Comparative Literature at the University of Erfurt since 1999 and is an internationally renowned Walter Benjamin scholar. She has also taught at the University of Konstanz, the Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt (Main), the Philipps-Universität Marburg, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her fellowships have taken her to the IKKM Bauhaus Universität Weimar and the Kulturwissenschaftliches Kolleg at the University of Konstanz.



Publications

„Kafkas Zerstreuungen“, in: Stefan Höhne und Manfred Weinberg (Hg.), Franz Kafka im interkulturellen Kontext, Weimar/Köln 2019, S. 229–262; gem. mit Juliane Vogel (Hg.), Flucht und Szene, Berlin 2018; "'Whatever one calls into the forest ...' . translations – echoes", in: Andrew Benjamin und Beatrice Hanssen (Hg.), Benjamin and Romanticism, London/New York 2002, S. 83–97 und S. 218–224; Das Trauerspielbuch, Bielefeld 2010.

Essay von Bettine Menke: „Babel-Babbeln. Zur Anderssprachigkeit, zum sprechenden/schreibenden Enteignen.“

Soeben erschienen in: wespennest Nr. 179: Viele Sprachen – eine Sprache?  Wien, Nov. 2020. Zu Mehrsprachigkeit und Literatur, u. a. von Mora, Trojanov, Ivanovic und Bettine Menke. Sie war IFK_Senior Fellow im Sommersemester 2020.

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04 May 2020
18:15
  • Lecture
IFK @Zoom
BETTINE MENKE

IFK_LIVE (ZOOM MEETING): Gebabbel, Kauderwelsch, Übersetzen, Wortspiele

Die Vielsprachigkeit der Sprache wird durch verschiedene Sprachphänomene und -situationen nahegelegt, die lange abgewertet oder marginalisiert wurden. Viele sprechen und schreiben eine Sprache, die nicht die eigene ist: Minderheiten, Migranten, in kleinen Sprachen, Sprachen im Werden. Literarische Texte wenden diese Lagen in Schreibstrategien.

Zum Nachhören 

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