Exophony

Exophony

by Yoko Tawada
Publication Date: 24/07/2025

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'Tawada's strange, exquisite book toys with ideas of language, identity and what it means to own someone else's story or one's own' ***The New Yorker***on Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear


Are you formed by your mother tongue?

How might the world unfold if you stepped outside of its rhythms?


In this playful and daring interrogation of language, the globally acclaimed Yoko Tawada reveals the poetics, politics and potential of existing outside one's mother tongue. From Senegalese writers discarding colonial-enforced French to the increasing use of loan words in her native Japanese, Tawada deconstructs the ways in which the world shapes and is shaped by languages: their hidden systems of power, their sweeping histories and, ultimately, the people who claim, reject, adapt or romanticise them.


Exophony is an invitation to revel in the possibilities that emerge when we dare to seek beyond the familiar - and a sharp, incisive series of essays in which Tawada's erudite wit and multidimensional curiosity sing.

ISBN:
9780349704180
9780349704180
Category:
Literary essays
Publication Date:
24-07-2025
Language:
English
Publisher:
John Murray Press
Yoko Tawada

Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960 and moved to Germany in 1982. She writes in Japanese and German, and her work has been awarded the most prestigious literary prizes in both countries, including the Akutagawa Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Goethe Medal. She is the author of stories, poems, plays, essays, and novels, including Memoirs of a Polar Bear, published by Portobello Books in 2017.

Available for download after 24/07/2025

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