The Divided City and the Divided Self
The Divided City and the Divided Self
The linguistic metaphors “language” of the city and “grammar” imply a correspondence between urban space and symbolic communication. In his Cours de linguistique générale, Ferdinand de Saussure used the example of the street to show how the linguistic sign is determined by difference. In this context, “language” performs an epistemological function, rather than a communicational one. Like continuity in space, a linguistic continuum is important to a city's identity. The significance of a correlation between both kinds of continuity is evident in cities whose space has shifted in and out of state borders, such as Constantinople/Istanbul, Straβburg/Strasbourg, Danzig/Gdansk, or Königsberg/Kaliningrad. Barcelona's modern history is linked to its struggle to retain a linguistic identity. Juan Marsé's 1990 political satire, El amante bilingüe (The Bilingual Lover), offers the most explicit literary intervention in Catalonia's language conflict and shows the protagonist experiencing the emerging bilingualism as a personality disorder.
Keywords: city, Barcelona, language, Juan Marsé, El amante bilingüe, bilingualism, Catalonia, linguistic identity, urban space, symbolic communication
Stanford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
