Memory, migration and poetics: German-language literature of the ‘Eastern Turn’ (2000-2020)

Thesis

This dissertation examines a new wave of migrant writing in Germany, Austria and Switzerland by German-speaking writers from Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, identified as an ‘Eastern Turn’ by Brigid Haines. Contrary to the conventional readings of these texts that tend to treat them primarily as socio-political documents, this project highlights the aesthetic qualities of the texts involved, allowing a richer insight into the topos of border-crossings (migration) and the dynamics of remembrance. This project starts from the scarcity of research on the complex entanglements between the poetics of memory, migration-experience and literary aesthetics in this body of literature and provides three case studies in order to address the limitations of existing scholarship. This interdisciplinary research points the way to an understanding of ‘migratory aesthetics’ (Mieke Bal 2007, Bal and Miguel A. Hernández-Navarro 2011) and borrows its methods from literary criticism, migration studies, memory studies, European studies, cultural studies and postcolonial critique among others.

Building on Murat Aydemir and Alex Rotas’s treatise on ‘migratory settings’ (2008), Chapter One explores how migration transforms spatial aesthetics by turning spaces into ‘condensed archives of national, ethnic, and linguistic memories’ (Azade Seyhan 2000). Identifying memories on the move and hybrid encounters associated with literary settings, this chapter investigates several problematic categories related to migration (such as identity, arrival and belonging). A critical analysis of sensory phenomena in Chapter Two illuminates the aesthetic organisation of selected works against thematic backgrounds rooted in various forms of memory (traumatic memory, the interaction between individual and collective memory) and the liminal experience of characters (such as physical and psychological migration and identity crisis). This chapter refers to theoretical insights on sensory aesthetics by scholars such as David Howes and Hans J. Rindisbacher. Photographic aesthetics is the focus of Chapter Three, which asks how writers respond to the inherited trauma of their family members in a post-memorial context and employ photographic images within the narrative economies of their texts. These chapters explore migration in multiple contexts, including the significance of the migration background of the authors discussed for transforming the landscape of memory in German-language fiction, the migration of lesser-known memories into a pan-European memory and the migration of memories across generational thresholds.

Authors: Chauhan, S

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-j2yy5ymvq
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: German, English
• Keywords: literary critique; 'Eastern Turn' in German literature; 'postcolonial turn' in German literature; European studies; memory studies; migration studies; memory and aesthetics in German literature; 'transnational turn' in German literature; memory and migration in German literature; literary studies
• Subjects: Immigrants' writings, German; Literary themes, motives; Literary form; Migration; Collective memory and literature; Postcolonial criticism; Memory in literature