Mündigkeit in language learner narrative

Abstract

The thesis takes as its starting point Immanuel Kant’s essay of 1784 ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment’ and by careful re-definition of one of the key terms from this essay, Mundigkeit, (commonly translated as ‘maturity’ or ‘majority’ in English) uses this as a framework within which to analyse cross-cultural narratives written in German, English and French which describe the problems and processes of language learning and linguistic migration. The thesis argues that the texts may be interpreted in terms of the loss and gain of Mundigkeit. Evidence for this is provided through a linguistic and metaphorical analysis, which suggests how Mundigkeit is enacted both thematically and stylistically in the texts described as ‘language learner narratives’. Before discussion of the processes of Mundigkeit in these texts, the thesis argues for the existence of ‘language learner narrative’ as a valid category for textual analysis. This discussion centres around a review of articles in Second Language Acquisition research and literary criticism which describe a genre called ‘language memoir’. This genre was first proposed within Romance Studies as a term to describe texts which describe linguistic transitions whether that be from one discourse to another of the mother tongue or from one language to another in a process of linguistic migration. Within Second Language Acquistion the term was adopted primarily for the description of texts which narrate the adoption of a foreign language and often for the purpose of ethnographic research, i.e. as data for the description of qualitative aspects of second language acquisition, thereby risking that the constructed nature of autobiographical narratives be underplayed.