About

This project examines how contemporary experimental and exophonic poetry in French and English provides a basis for transnational community. The term ‘exophonic’ describes a text written in a language that is not native to the writer. In poetry, examples of this practice make extensive use of audio and visual media, demonstrating creative methods that exceed or even bypass the book or the written page as the primary medium. This intermedial practice creates an alternative literary space to traditional notions of authorship and readership, which sustain the position of nationhood as the dominant discourse of belonging. By comparing the poetry of Michèle Métail, Michelle Grangaud, Gherasim Luca, Anne-James Chaton, Caroline Bergvall, and Roseanne Watt, this research will demonstrate how a theory of the exophonic – ‘sound from the outside’ – allows us to imagine a concept of community based on translingual and intermedial writing practices that, in turn, reveals new sites of togetherness. This research will contribute to the relatively new field of translingual studies, in which the particular significance of poetry is yet to be fully explored.