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Publikationen » Literaturwissenschaft » ‘Canaille, canaglia, Schweinhunderei’: Language Personalities and Communication Failure in the Multilingual Fiction of Anthony Burgess
Julian Preece
‘Canaille, canaglia, Schweinhunderei’: Language Personalities and Communication Failure in the Multilingual Fiction of Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) drew on his knowledge of foreign languages in a range of novels throughout a literary career which spanned four decades, for most of which time he lived in non-English speaking countries, such as Malaya, Malta, Italy or Monaco. He also practised as a translator from both French and Italian and contended that his writing in English was enriched in terms of form and style by exposure to other languages and their literatures. The article focuses on Time for a Tiger (1956), A Clockwork Orange (1962), ABBA ABBA (1977), and Earthly Powers (1980) to argue that Burgess’s interest in translation and communication between speakers of different languages was far from programmatic. It was deployed to different ends in each novel, often for comic effect but also to explore existential and social concerns and to chart an attitude to difference and other human beings, benign in Time for a Tiger, malign in A Clockwork Orange. The article posits the notion of a ‘language personality’ to account for these differences but concludes that ultimately the accent for Burgess lies on failure and that he finds different ways to depict the pit- and pratfalls in communication between speakers and writers of different languages.
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