Scholars will address the question: what is a “mother tongue”?

The Department of German and Scandinavian will hold a symposium “What is a Mother Tongue? Translingualism Today” at the University of Oregon to honor Professor Susan C. Anderson, who will retire this year after 37 years of service to the UO. Professor Anderson’s scholarship has contributed to the profession of German Studies through her research on contemporary literatures of migration, multicultural Germany, and Viennese modernism. The symposium will take place February 9–10, 2023 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Gerlinger Alumni Lounge, and will feature invited German scholars from across North America as well as UO scholars Michael Stern, Tze-Yin Teo, Glynne Walley, and Susan Anderson herself.

According to organizer Professor Jeffrey Librett: 

As literature by writers with a migrant background becomes more widespread in German letters (as in other national traditions), the ideal of one language—often designated as the “mother tongue” or Muttersprache—that can be perfectly mastered by those who are born into it

is dissipating. The monolingual ideal relies in part on maternal metaphors for legitimacy. This ideal grounds notions of ethnic and national identities and helps delineate concepts of native and foreigner. It serves as the basis of what Yasemin Yildiz, a prominent Turkish-German scholar, describes as the “monolingual paradigm,” which structures our view of cultures as distinct and exclusionary and the relations among them as hierarchical. Challenging this paradigm are exophonic texts: texts that represent the “mother tongue” outside of itself so that, according to Paul McQuade, we can view the language with which we were once intimately familiar depicted in such a way that its function as “mother” is no longer recognizable. This in turn allows for translingual uses of language in literature that attenuate the boundary between what is and is not a national language. The literature of translingualism and exophony attempts specifically to undermine hierarchies and accentuate differences, and can help make the tensions between the power of the “mother tongue” and new modes of interchange and kinship visible. 

The symposium is cosponsored by the OHC’s Endowment for Public Outreach in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities; and by the College of Arts and Sciences, Comparative Literature, a DAAD Conference Grant, and the School of Global Studies and Languages. For more information contact Jeffrey Librett, jlibrett@uoregon.edu