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Meertaligheid of veelzijdigheid?
De rol van netwerken in de perceptie van meertaligheid bij Marie-Caroline Murray (1741-1831)
- Amsterdam University Press
- Source: Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, Volume 139, Issue 2/3, aug. 2023, p. 220 - 237
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- 01 aug. 2023
Samenvatting
In the few articles that have been written about ‘la Muse Belgique’ Marie-Caroline Murray over the past 250 years, she is invariably labelled a polyglot. However, the question arises to what extent Murray effectively internalised this multilingualism, and to what extent she actively deployed it in her writings. An initial analysis of her personal correspondence shows that her exceptional erudition was accompanied by a predominantly passive knowledge of these languages, and that this was mainly determined by the changing networks in which Murray moved throughout her life. This article examines the role of these networks in Marie-Caroline Murray’s perception of multilingualism by systematically mapping them. This staged ‘deconstruction’ of multilingualism shows that Murray repeatedly outdid herself in making original translations through these cosmopolitan contacts (Camões), but that this did not lead to an internalisation of multilingualism as revealed by Murray’s later descriptions of literary agency.