The Languages of Taste: Literary Multilingualism and Multilingual Reception
Event
This event has now finished.
Event date
Wednesday 10 December 2025, 6pm to 8pm
Location
Lecture Theatre SLB/118, Spring Lane Building, Campus West, University of York (Map)
Admission
Free admission, booking not required
Event details
The Modern Research School Annual Berthoud Lecture with speaker Professor Wen-chin Ouyang, Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature, SOAS.
Literary multilingualism is today one of the most popular topics in literary studies. However, do we read multilingual literary works multilingually or monolingually? Locating my inquiry in the multilingual writings of Moroccan Abdelfattah Kilito, which combine creative practice with critical reflection, I reflect on our monolingual critical approach to literary multilingualism and ask whether it is possible to adopt multilingualism as method? What will a multilingual reception look like? Can an interrogation of literary taste guide it?
Taste begins with the physical pleasure we experience when we encounter a thing, goes through a disciplined reflection on our visceral response to pleasure, and ends with an articulated set of values that we imagine to be universal. In literary studies, a subjective like and dislike for a literary work we read is first educated into a literary taste located in universalized aesthetics, then disciplined into a critical method for the appreciation, evaluation, and theorisation of works of art. In his creative and critical works, Kilito shows us that it is possible to multilingualise taste. He entangles instinctual response with disciplined criticism, integrates into each other the two languages he writes in, Arabic and French, and creates a tension between the simultaneously pluriversal and universal impulses in the world of literary taste that only a multilingual reception can resolve.
Wen-chin Ouyang
Wen-chin Ouyang is Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at SOAS, University of London. Born in Taiwan and raised in Libya, she completed her BA in Arabic at Tripoli University and PhD Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University. She taught Arabic language, literature and culture at Columbia, Chicago and Virginia before moving to London. Prof. Ouyang is the author of Literary Criticism in Medieval Arabic-Islamic Culture: The Making of a Tradition (1997), Poetics of Love in the Arabic Novel (2012) and Politics of Nostalgia in the Arabic Novel (2013). She has also published widely on the Thousand and One Nights, often in comparison with classical and modern Arabic narrative traditions, European and Hollywood cinema, magic realism, and Chinese storytelling. A native speaker of Arabic and Chinese, Prof. Ouyang has been working towards Arabic-Chinese comparative literary and cultural studies, including Silk Road Studies. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and Academician of Academia Sinica.