The paper responds to the invitation in the Conference Guidelines to consider whether "the transcultured self is a utopian ideal". Taking a humanist and Bergsonian view, it presents three transcultured selves from modern European culture to explore a model of cultural identity based on the idea of "being in becoming". Foreign language acquisition is viewed as integral to the ideal of an enlarging consciousness which comes to embrace the "other" through accommodating new ways of seeing and responding to the world. A pedagogical model is proposed for exploring this conception, centred on the emerging genre of border-writing and the establishment of a new literary canon. (Contains 3 notes.)