‘George Eliot’s French’: transcending the monocultural self in Daniel Deronda

Focusing on an analysis of French lexical items in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, this article examines the nature of composite textuality. More precisely, it proposes a way of describing the use of an intercultural idiom in Daniel Deronda as a way of shedding light on the nature of linguistic borrowing in the context of dialogical identity. This will provide the basis for the claim that the characters’ use of mixed utterances generates inferences which make the transcending of the monocultural self possible and create alternatives of being.