Un'erranza lungo le frontiere. Sulla scrittura di Yoko Tawada

Whereas Yoko Tawada’s peculiar coming and going through frontiers has often been understood as a poetic correlative of Homi Bhabha’s theory of “the third space”, her stories and verses seem on the contrary to escape any space and obey a poetic strategy which not only questions the logocentric structure of language, but also deconstructs any autotelic meaning.
Focusing on Tawada’s nomadism through languages and cultures as a form of resistance against any essentialism, this essay attempts a new evaluation of her erratic mode of writing, with particular reference to her last novel, Etüden im Schnee (Études in the Snow), an unprecedented experiment in eluding the autotelic concept par excellence: the concept of “identity”.