CASCELLA, Daniela (2021). Nothing as we need it for chimeric writing. Doctoral, Sheffield Hallam University.
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Cascella_2022_PhD_NothingAsWe.pdf - Accepted Version
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Cascella_2022_PhD_NothingAsWe.pdf - Accepted Version
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Abstract
In this thesis-work a new form of critical writing is imagined, practiced, and studied.
Shaped by encounters with literature not translated in English; by the polyphonies,
artifices, and concealments of a bilingual self; by the sense of speechlessness and
haunting when writing about texts that cannot be instantly quoted, this form is named
chimeric from the mythological Chimera: a monstrous creature made of three different
parts, impossible in theory but real in the imagination and in the reading of the myth.
Similarly, this thesis-work is a composite of interrelated parts written in different styles,
some of which may seem impossible, monstrous, disturbing. It holds practice and
commentary without demarcation between creative and critical components. It presents
chimeric writing as enmeshment and conversation with its subject matters, favouring
impurity rather than detachment and embracing exaggeration, repetition, laughter, and
self-parody as legitimate forms of knowledge.
A chimera is also the object of an unattainable yearning. This thesis-work manifests
yearning for the subjects it studies: untranslated prose works by Alejandra Pizarnik,
Cristina Campo, and Roberto Calasso. It defies any demand for scholarship to be
exhaustive, and writes scholarship exhausted by desire. Rather than writing monographic
studies of Calasso, Campo, Pizarnik as a distant critic, a three-voiced character speaks
with them, inhabits their words, rehearses forms derived from modes of critical writing
proposed by them, and extends their projects. Commenting on their works, she comments
on her own.
The contribution of this thesis-work lies primarily in its articulation, as it embodies its
argument for composite and impure writing in its form; and in thinking and practicing
chimeric writing through neologisms such as csiting and transcelating. These declare and
formalise new and entangled possibilities for the writing of research and for writing as
research which, listening to literature beyond the limits of textual analysis, dismiss the
implications of the term reflection, assuming detachment, in favour of an aural method
of resonance, allowing enmeshment and interference. Unsettling language, this project
welcomes imaginative wordplay as a committed mode of scholarship; presents
possibilities for working with citation beyond the boundaries of quotation marks; writes
knowledge as chimera, as we need it.
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