Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development
Editor and Book Reviews Editor: John Edwards (St Francis Xavier University, Canada)
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Volume: 25 Number: 2 Page: 140–158
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Different Languages, Different Emotions? Perspectives from Autobiographical Literature
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Mary Besemeres
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Bilingual life writing offers a rare insight into the relationship between languages and emotions. This article explores ways in which some striking contemporary memoirs and novels of bilingual experience approach questions of cultural difference in emotion. The texts considered include
memoirs by Eva Hoffman and Tim Parks, autobiographical fiction by Lilian Ng and Nino Ricci, and personal essays by Stanisław Baranczak and Zhengdao Ye. I focus on these writers' treatment of the role played in their own or their protagonists' lives by forms of emotional expression that
do not readily translate between their two languages. These include expressive forms such as diminutives and interjections as well as concepts which invoke specific feelings, like the Polish szczęśliwy (happy) and American English 'happy'. Another significant area represented
in these texts is the extent to which nonverbal means of expressing feelings translate, or fail to. The narratives explored here suggest that different languages make possible distinct emotional styles, which engage different parts of a bilingual's self.
Keywords: BILINGUALISM, EMOTIONS, CROSS-CULTURAL, AUTOBIOGRAPHY
© 2004 Multilingual Matters
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