The term transglossic means 'speaking across'. It has been used before, most notably in linguistics. Our choice of the term to describe contemporary storytelling comes from the idea that, both formally and thematically, many contemporary stories are moving across conventional categories and definitions. Our project investigates why, and with what potential impacts, this phenomenon may be occurring.

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We identify transglossic stories as having six key features. These are first discussed in our article ‘The Transglossic: Contemporary Literature and the Limitations of the Modern’ which was published in the journal English Studies in 2021. These features are:

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1) Deep Simultaneity: the simultaneous occupation of multiple timeframes, perspectives, scales, and spatialities.

2) Planetary Consciousness: cosmopolitical global encounters that reach across species, nations, and which advance an intersectional commitment to environmental justice as an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist project.

3) Intersectional Transversality: the queering of normative identities as part of a wider politics of community.

4) Artistic Responsibility: the of writer as public intellectual and a return to more explicitly ideological stories.

5) Productive Authenticity: materiality and emotional engagement as a mediated and contingent driver of political change.

6) Trans-Formalism:  movement between styles in the service of ethico-political imperatives and meaning making.

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A transglossic story may not contain all of these elements to the same degree, but we see them as interrelated parts of a whole that together form the uniqueness of many contemporary narratives. 

 

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