The Quest for Language: Linguistic and Identity Issues in the Work of Ljubica Milićević

Abstract

A Serbian-born writer based in Quebec, Ljubica Milićević develops a body of work deeply shaped by reflections on language and its implications for identity. Her writing is characterized by a constant questioning, revealing both a multilingual grounding and a tension between belonging to and distancing herself from her homeland and its language. Through a style marked by linguistic displacements – such as the reciprocal influence of the languages she masters and the interweaving of cultural references – and through subtle hybridization, the author interrogates not only the structure of language, but also its power of representation and transformation of reality. Language thus becomes a space where multilingual experience confronts memories tied to exile and places of origin with new realities, thereby recomposing an identity in motion. By analyzing heterolinguistic features and the symbolic use of characters’ names, narrative strategies, and the ways in which the author confronts monolingual frameworks, this study sheds light on the mechanisms through which Milićević inscribes the question of language at the heart of her literary project. Her writing oscillates between the appropriation of a new language and the distancing from the mother tongue, which becomes a distorted mirror of a bygone sense of belonging. Far from being a mere tool of communication, language, in Milićević’s work, emerges as a shifting space, shaped by the experience of expatriation, by the intertwining of her languages of life, and by the dynamics of self-redefinition enacted in her writing.