Exophony, Self-Translation and Hybrid Identities: Writing a Novel in a Language Other than the Mother Tongue

This practice-based PhD explores exophonic writing as a process of cultural and linguistic negotiation, challenging boundaries between languages, identities and countries. The creative component consists of a literary novel with elements of autofiction, which follows the coming-of-age story of nineteen-year-old songwriter and outsider, Mia Dumitrescu, who, together with her father, Damian, leaves her small Romanian town behind for the promise of London. The novel depicts a fictionalised multilingual and intercultural lived experience, exploring themes of cultural and linguistic non-belonging. The critical component reflects on the exophonic writing of MIA, examining not only the mechanics behind creative writing outside the mother tongue, but also the motivations, advantages and consequences of it. The first chapter investigates the Exophonic Sensibility, as well as the complex landscape of multilingualism and its linguistic terminologies, challenging the monolingual paradigm, rejecting the fixity of the mother tongue understood as a writer’s only ‘true’ language, and defending my own choice of terminology. The second chapter turns to another exophonic writer’s journey, examining his transition from Romanian to a ‘major’ Western language, French, and how his experience mirrors my own. It delves into Emil Cioran’s self-exile in Paris and my novel’s protagonist’s self-exile in London, questioning exophonic writing as a creative methodology which reflects themes and narratives built around linguistic and cultural displacement and a sense of ‘outsiderness.’ The final chapter is a deep dive into the mechanics behind exophonic writing and the role that translation and self-translation play in it. It proposes a new framework for understanding exophonic writing, consisting of five interconnected stages: writing, translation, pseudotranslation, self-translation and code-switching.