Interests and Research#

Rainier Grutman started studying bilingual writers and multilingual texts in the late 1980s, long before they became fashionable research topics. He paid particular attention to these phenomena in the two countries he knows best, Belgium and Canada, but also investigated the past and present of multilingual writing in Spain and Italy, as well as in “metropolitan” French literature. The book that grew out of his doctoral dissertation on multilingualism in Quebec, Des langues qui résonnent (Montréal 1997), was awarded the Gabrielle-Roy prize for Canadian literary criticism in 1998. It was updated for a 20th-anniversary edition with Paris publisher, Classiques Garnier. Widely reviewed and quoted, its terminology has become a staple of postcolonial studies in France, Italy, and French-speaking Africa.

He was gradually able to combine his literary scholarschip with his ongoing interest in translation studies (developed during his MA studies at the KU Leuven), both in his teaching and in his publications. Self-translation, i.e., the practice of bilingual writers who translate their own work, has become a focal point in this respect, as evidenced by a collection of essays, L’Autotraduction littéraire (Paris, 2016), and numerous articles (in French, English, Spanish, and Italian).