Multiculturalism, Multilingualism and Modernity

Abstract

The article views closely and critically why the issues of multiculturalism and multilingualism have arisen only recently and what motivates the growing interest for such ideas to be elaborated as a theme in some outstanding prose texts in the eighties. In romanticism, when Goethe launched the idea of world literature, no such ideas were focused on, although cross-cultural experiences existed. The point is that our evolved attention to ideas of multiculturalism and multilingualism certainly is grounded in the changing experiences of ourselves and in historical shifts in thought towards a pluralist ontology. It is evident that when conceptualizing the cultural reality of globalized processes at the end of the 20^th century, a totalizing mode of thinking constitutes a problem, not a solution. We agree that the open reality of cultural processes, with its inherent logic of conflict and contradiction, cannot be grounded in a single source, and we also recognize the existence, truth, or fact of history, which can no longer be defined in accordance with a single meaning. The paper brings into discussion the concept of modernity and the strategies of modernist (and postmodernist) art and their non-finalized concept of truth in relation to views of heteroglossia and dialogism, which bring about a changing view on questions of certainty, totality, the concept of self, etc. Modernity as awareness of time, i.e. as experience of immediacy (openness and freedom of the present), went through its most delicate shifts in meaning after the mid-nineteenth century. In its Baudelaireian reinterpretation, modernity implies consciousness of the present in its presentness, and indicates an open-ended event of immediacy of life in its processual character (as a fleeting instant in its purely instantaneous quality, i.e. quality of contingency). Modernity in this sense can confront the never-ending contradictions of reality and truth about it. Modernist art, in which the so-called “crisis of identity” was fully elaborated as a dominant idea, was able to promote such a postpositivist concept of objectivity through its poetics and their own strategies of dialogism. Cross-border and cross-cultural interests, as well as multilinguality, were well-exhibited in a set of principles inherent in modernist texts.