The Nomadic Footnote: Multilingualism and Transnationalism in Modernist Paratexts

The recent transnational turn in the new modernist studies has illuminated the complicated geopolitical arrangements, connections, and imaginings of modernisms that are not fixed within national (mono)lingual borders. However, there is not currently a study investigating how this movement across geographical space is enacted via movement across textual space. Literary transnationalism and multilingualism are not limited to the text itself but extend to its paratextual elements such as footnotes, translator’s notes, indexes – the myriad connections and compositions of everything that surrounds the text. This thesis therefore aims to address this gap by investigating the relationship between multilingualism, transnationalism, and paratexts in Anglophone modernist literature.
Using three case studies of literary paratexts from texts by Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees, and T. S. Eliot, I show how Anglophone modernist writers manipulate the liminality of paratextual conventions in multilingual and transnational ways to open up a relational, open, and indeterminate space in the interstices between texts and languages. My theoretical framework of materialist “nomadology” as developed from the critical theory of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Rosi Braidotti illuminates the points of intersection between ideas of multilingualism and transnationalism and the conceptualization of literature as a multiple and material spatial plane. Through this, the fixity of the boundaries in national literary canons is destabilized and deterritorialized, at the same time as the spatial-textual boundaries of the material object also become indeterminate. This first book-length study of literary multilingual paratexts thus proposes a new mode of reading which changes the way we think about the multilingual experimentation of Anglophone modernism, and serves as paradigm for future work on the everyday materialism of multilingualism.