CURRENT RESEARCH STUDENTS

Kamila Makhsadova

Thesis Title:

Language politics and linguistic intimacy in the works and lives of multilingual modernist couples

Supervisor:

Nicoletta Asciuto

Description

My thesis will be the first in-depth study of how three distinct multilingual modernist couples use different languages in their writing and their intimate relationships. The couples I chose as my case studies were authors and translators who knew a number of languages and used all or some of them in their life writing as well as in their creative and translation work. I argue that multilingualism as a whole as well as individual languages play a role as dramatic characters in the narratives these couples construct about themselves and their intimate relationships. At the same time, these couples’ portrayal of their languages is charged with the characteristics of national languages imposed on them by language politics of the interwar period. My thesis argues that these couples used languages in ways which are significantly
relevant to our understanding of foreign language learning and multilingualism in Britain and Western Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. Studying these couples’ relationship to the languages they knew offers us an insight into how modernist authors harnessed multilingualism at the intersection of the personal and the political, the private and the public.

In my first chapter, I examine the case of Edwin and Willa Muir and the tension between their three languages: Scots, English, and German. The Muirs’ writing about languages reveals internalised shame and a nostalgia for linguistic wholeness, so they propose a strict division between their languages in their non-fiction and autobiography. However, the linguistic boundaries are more unstable in their fiction and their correspondence. My second chapter is about Eugene and Maria Jolas, the founders and editors of the modernist multilingual journal transition (1927-1938), and their utopian ideas about Atlantica, a universal language based on English, and English-French bilingualism. In my final chapter, I investigate how Jane Harrison and Hope Mirrlees used Russian to create a private space, in which Russian not only served a message-coding purpose in their correspondence but also played an important role in extending and expanding their world knowledge. This chapter also looks at the English translations from Russian that Harrison and Mirrlees did together in Paris, such as The Book of the Bear. In all of my case studies, I contend that language
intimacy mixes and mingles with language politics, providing new contexts of the interwar period in Britain and Western Europe.

I hold a BA in World Languages and Literature from Nazarbayev University (Kazakhstan) and a MA in British Literary and Cultural Studies from Saarland University (Germany). My doctoral research is fully funded by the YGRS Overseas Research Scholarship. I speak Russian, Kazakh, English, and German, and I have recently started learning French. I am also interested in creative and translation work.