The Recipe for Novelty: Using Bilingualism and Indigenous Literary Genres in an Advanced Level L2 Creative Writing Context in Pakistan

Abstract

With literatures in English asserting their legitimacy all across the globe in the post-colonial backdrop, what came to the fore was the predilection of various ‘Native’ writers in the former colonies to play with various indigenous literary genres while writing in English. This ‘hybridization’ (Bhabha 1994, 5) of literature has indeed generated ‘various and complex results’ (Eliot). While Harper views Creative Writing as a ‘form of face-making’ (Harper 2010), we can further imply that it is an interaction with faces that act and react within their own cultures. Therefore, in the case of second language creative writers, Creative Writing allows a synergy between the target language and the local literary paradigms. Keeping these trends in view, certain activities can be designed in an advanced class of second language Creative Writers, especially in a Pakistani context, since the variety of the local literary paradigms can allow an easeful substitution of stylistic patterns and lexical items. This article aims at showing how the conventions of various genres of Urdu Literature can be utilized in advanced level L2 Creative Writing classrooms.