Abstract
(1) As a long time writer, I always found, even before I began to publish, that my work was difficult to categorise, even while categories seemed essential for publication, reception and visibility. (2) In this personal essay, I apply the notion of the transcultural to a short writing [auto]biography. The methodology adopted for this purpose is a form of autoethnography: “a form of self-reflection and writing that explores the researcher’s personal experience and connects this autobiographical story to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings”1 to explore how my immigrant background and transcultural lived experience is reflected in my creative writing, and to give an account of how my literary output has been placed in various but always restrictive pre-existing categories. I am also encouraged by Mikhail Epstein’s proposed “scriptorics”, the study of the one who writes Each section of the essay is divided into two: the first sections provide a succinct version of the issues in a developing writer’s life, framed by the need for the practice and production to “belong” somewhere; the second sections take them to a posited “Transcultural Space” where the work seems more authentically to have originated and in which it seems to be more perceptively read. (3) The result is not so much a conventional academic article as a fiction writer’s reflection on her work in the embrace of an inclusive and meaning-making realm.
Highlights
In Transformative Humanities: a Manifesto, Mikhail Epstein proposes what he calls scriptorics: A discipline dedicated to the writing human: “those for whom the very act of writing constitutes their way of life and worldview”; its key tenets are questions like “who writes? For whom?” [2]
This essay may be useful to literary critics and researchers interested in exploring the effects of physical, cultural and psychological mobility on creative literary productions
To experiment is constantly to interrogate and test what you think you know, to be open to new ways of considering, to break structures apart and find new patterns in the pieces. This is the essence of existence in Transcultural Space
Summary
In Transformative Humanities: a Manifesto, Mikhail Epstein proposes what he calls scriptorics:. Epstein’s proposal encourages the present writer, author mostly of novels and short fiction, to offer an overview of her writing biography as most productively framed by the concepts and sympathies embraced by the transcultural, in a context where identity is increasingly understood as labile, subject to alteration, to situational definition. It is as if the transcultural were always the destination, though it remains to be seen if it proves to be another transitional space or one that is so comprehensively inclusive that it has no limits. This essay may be useful to literary critics and researchers interested in exploring the effects of physical, cultural and psychological mobility on creative literary productions
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