Language socialization, communicative competence and identity: Literary representations of the language learner in twentieth-century German literature

This dissertation engages the two traditionally separate fields of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and literary studies to examine literary representations of language learners in twentieth-century German literature. SLA research brings its unique interests and research questions to the text, for instance the connection between language socialization and language acquisition, concepts such as communicative competence or the identity of the language learner. Literary studies provides close reading techniques facilitated through literary stylistic analysis as well as the understanding that texts have to be viewed within their sociocultural and literary histories.;By analyzing and discussing the respective protagonists of Franz Kafka's short prose "Ein Bericht fur eine Akademie" (1919), Peter Handke's play Kaspar (1967), and Christa Wolf's novel Kassandra (1983) as fictional language learners, this interdisciplinary dissertation shows how both fields can enrich and complement each other. On one hand, the identification and analytic discussion of SLA concepts and metaphors shed new light on the overall meaning of these three literary texts. On the other, consideration of the discursive choices that authors make when encoding language learners in fiction, their intentions, imagined audiences as well as their positions within sociocultural and literary histories highlight the value of stylistic and structural examinations of literary texts for SLA research.;This approach stands in stark contrast to a few SLA researchers who have recently begun to examine plot descriptions of language acquisition and socialization found in literary autobiographies like those of Alice Kaplan or Eva Hoffman. Their appeal to these descriptions of language acquisition and language socialization in literary autobiographies results from their pursuit for potential sources of aspects of language acquisition that cannot be directly accessed through SLA research. This dissertation, however, argues resolutely against the way in which they interpret literary accounts of language acquisition and socialization as ethnographic data and proposes to appreciate the examined texts as literary constructions created by authorial intent.;By interpreting Kafka's, Handke's and Wolf's text through the lens of both disciplines, this dissertation reveals a variety of paradoxes in language acquisition and socialization that traditional SLA research has not addressed.