Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Part I Bodies

1. The Patched-Up Face of Multilingualism

2. Organic Metaphors of Language

3. Grotesque Body Images

4. Body Parts: Tongues and Eyes

5. The Embodied Plurilingual Self

Part II Family Ties

6. Mother-Tongues and Linguistic Family Trees

7. Beyond Bilingual Bigamy

8. Interlingual Predicaments

9. Linguistic Promiscuity and Incestuous Bisexualism

10. Adoptive and Stepmother Tongues

Part III Spaces

11. Territorializing National Languages

12. The Centrifugal Forces of Variation and Stratification

13. Continents and Archipelagos

14. The Ocean of Heteroglossia

15. Networks and Constellations

Conclusion

References

Index

About the Author

Rainer Guldin is lecturer for German Culture and Language at the Faculties of Communication Sciences and Economics of the Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano (Switzerland). His publications include Vilém Flusser (1920-1991). Ein Leben in der Bodenlosigkeit. Biographie (2017) and Translation as Metaphor (2016).

Reviews

In a work which is at once a monograph, a reference book and an encyclopedia of concepts,
Rainer Guldin systematises, classifies, analyses and synthesises such metaphors of multilingual
expression. He weaves together literary examples from many cultures with relevant philosophical
perspectives, to produce a taxonomy of metaphor which is divided into categories dealing with
bodies, family ties and spaces. Each is given a section of the book. Natasha Lvovich, JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUAL AND MULTICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT, 2021, VOL. 42, NO. 6