This work explores the concepts of both language and identity within a German context. In Chapter One the issue of language, ranging from its origins to its actual meaning and usage, is covered as discussed by such well-known European thinkers as Condillac, Rousseau, Herder, Humboldt, Nietzsche and Benjamin in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapter Two investigates the idea of identity beginning on an individual level with the mother-child relationship and moves into a discussion of identity on the national level with examples of German thought and history to explore how language played a role in the development of the German nation. In Chapter Three, the exophonic writer, Yoko Tawada, is both introduced and implemented to examine the convergence of both language and identity on a transnational level in German literature, where multilingualism and transnationalism play fundamental roles. The concepts of language and identity as inspected by Yoko Tawada and how she defamiliarizes and deconstructs language in turn creating new linguistic dimensions from which to view both language and identity are examined. Ultimately, a next progression in literary evolution is proposed as consisting of exophonic writing, breaking traditional identity dichotomies as well as of the ability to interact with language from the ‘in-between,’ i.e., outside of language itself.
