The temporal in-betweenness of Caroline Bergvall’s heterolingual poetics in Meddle English, Drift, and Alisoun Sings
This article explores the formation and critical potential of contemporary French-Norwegian artist and poet Caroline Bergvall’s medieval trilogy, Meddle English (2011), Drift (2015), and Alisoun Sings (2019). In these three books, Bergvall develops a heterolingual aesthetic by creating a language th...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA)
2025-06-01
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| Series: | E-REA |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/erea/19899 |
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| Summary: | This article explores the formation and critical potential of contemporary French-Norwegian artist and poet Caroline Bergvall’s medieval trilogy, Meddle English (2011), Drift (2015), and Alisoun Sings (2019). In these three books, Bergvall develops a heterolingual aesthetic by creating a language that is materially composed of diachronic and dialectical variations of English, both from medieval times, and imagined futures. The result is a language that rests in a temporal in-between that reveals the foreignness of English and undermines its monolingual and exclusionary dynamics. By attending to the temporal strategies through which Bergvall elaborates her poetics, I argue that the trilogy builds alternative imaginaries of language in a progressive utopian momentum that aims to rethink both possible futures and our contemporaneity. |
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| ISSN: | 1638-1718 |