The Hungarian-French Language Shift in Agota Kristof’s The Illiterate

Abstract

The article examines Agota Kristof’s autobiographical novel L’Analphabète (The Illiterate). The author of the memoir was a Switzerland-based Hungarian writer who escaped from her homeland after the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and spent most of her life in the Swiss city of Neuchâtel. The Illiterate describes a long and painful process of the main character’s assimilation in the new culture with a special focus on the problems associated with acquiring the French language. The analysis concentrates on the ways in which this dramatic process of a language shift is depicted in the text. The initial part of the article presents the concept of migrant literature and lists the key issues related to it. Particular attention is also given to the concept of translingualism, which serves as the methodological basis for this article.