Narrating the Meaning of Existence: An Analysis of the Autobiographical Narratives of Three Translingual Writers Amer Ahmed Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts and Applied Sciences (CAAS), Dhofar University, Oman Iryna Lenchuk Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts and Applied Sciences (CAAS), Dhofar University, Oman Abstract—This paper focuses on the autobiographical narratives of three translingual writers, Nabokov, Brodsky and Makine. Their narratives are analyzed by taking into account Vygotsky’s ideas on the relationship between language and thought (1987), Bruner’s ideas on storytelling (1986, 2002) and Swain’s concept of languaging as a meaning-making process through language (Swain, 2006). The paper investigates the question of the role of language in making sense of writers’ lives as displaced people. In order to answer this question, we analyzed the autobiographical narratives for languaging episodes that are defined as autobiographical excerpts where the writers attempt to make sense of their lives as displaced people. The following major themes have been identified as the result of the analysis: construction of the lost world out of new experiences, discovery of the meaning of existence, reconciliation through cultural and linguistic hybridity. We believe that the implication of the study is that it can resonate with the lives of other displaced people at the time of cultural and linguistic superdiversity. Index Terms—translingual writers, languaging, sociocultural theory, autobiographical narrative, linguistic superdiversity “…attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp the meaning of existence” (Brodsky, 1986, p. 1) I. INTRODUCTION This paper focuses on the autobiographical narratives of three translingual writers, Nabokov (1989), Brodsky (1986) and Makine (1997). Their narratives are analyzed by taking into account Vygotsky’s ideas on the relationship between language and thought (1987), Bruner’s ideas on storytelling (1986, 2002) and Swain’s concept of languaging as a meaning-making process through language (Swain et al. 2009; Lenchuk & Swain, 2010). Within this framework, narrative is viewed as a meaning-making tool that facilitates the narrator’s understanding of the self and of the social and cultural contexts of their lives. In his analysis of narrative, Bruner states that in the mind of a storyteller, memory and imagination are interconnected, as memory can never fully capture the past, nor can it ever escape it. By alienating the storyteller from the familiar, storytelling provides a space to language about the past, and through languaging, the narrator discovers new knowledge and new experiences. The three writers, whose narratives are analyzed in this paper, are refugees. At different points of time they were forced to leave Russia and seek asylum in a new land. While being in the liminal spaces of their newly adopted countries, the three displaced writers have used their narratives to reconstruct and reinvent three different Russian worlds. In the process of narrating, they have gained knowledge about their past, present and future. Through their narratives, they have shown us that narrative is a profoundly human act and that it helps us understand who and what we are, what has happened and why we are doing what we are doing (Bruner, 2002, p. 64). This paper is organized in the following way. Section two provides a description of the theoretical framework chosen in this study. Section three states the research question and the chosen methodology. Section four provides a description and an analysis of the data. Section five discusses the findings and section six suggests some pedagogical implications for the teachers and learners of English as an Additional Language (EAL) based on the results of the study. Section seven concludes the paper. II. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK In this section we discuss the theoretical concepts presented in the works of Vygotsky (1987), Bruner (1986, 2002) and Swain (2006, 2009) that emphasize the role of language in the social and cognitive development of human beings. ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 11, No. 12, pp. 1702-1708, December 2021 DOI: https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1112.24 © 2021 ACADEMY PUBLICATION