The Languages of Taste: Literary Multilingualism and Multilingual Reception

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Taste, in the English language, straddles the visceral and metaphoric, experience and memory, pleasure and value, and passion and discipline. Its meaning, in its multiplicity, seems structured by a semiological-epistemological trajectory that 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 of a literary work we read is first educated into a literary taste located in universalizable aesthetics, then disciplined into a critical method for the appreciation, evaluation, and theorisation of works of art.  Such as semiological-epistemological structure of literary taste has not been free of critical scrutiny. We have asked questions about the role of the marketplace in shaping taste, of patronage and social forces in canonization, of power structures in promoting and censoring certain types of literary expressions, and of the entanglement of politics and aesthetics. A multilingual perspective is absent. Locating my inquiry in the recent rise of literary multilingualism as a category both of creative practice and critical reflection, which converge in the writings of Moroccan Abdelfattah Kilito, I take advantage of the tensions between the simultaneously pluriversal and universal impulses in the world of literary taste to reflect on our monolingual critical approach to multilingual literary practice. Is it possible to adopt multilingualism as method? How can taste, as instinctual response and disciplined criticism, guide it, and what will it look like?