Narrating Migration: The Experience of Migration in Contemporary British Prose Fiction

本项目研究二战以来英国散文小说中对移民经历的文学描写。利用基本的叙事学文本分析以及跨国社会空间的社会学概念（托马斯·法斯特），该项目将分析小说和短篇小说的叙事技巧和文化功能。基于对迁移的广泛理解，迁移是对居住地的空间重新安置过程，涉及超越社会政治和文化边界（Ingrid Oswald），该项目在几个相互关联的调查层面上组织。首先，我们将研究迁移现象的哪些方面和阶段在手头的文本中表达，以及语料库作为一个整体包含哪些模式和主题。其次，文本表现人物经历的移民现实的叙事策略将是研究的中心。第三，在我们以主题为基础的叙事学评估的背景下，我们的特别兴趣在于跨国社会空间的具体文学表现和唤起。社会学术语“跨国社会空间”指的是移民在其接收国与其原籍国之间建立的各种物质、个人、象征和文化联系。基于这一概念，该项目的中心假设指出，移民文学创造了心理空间，在这个空间中，移民的经验现实被揭示出来，并被想象为与其他国家和文化相互联系。小说和短篇小说在表现移民人物的生活和经历时，以不同特征和评价的生活和想象的认知情感关系的形式唤起大不列颠与世界其他领域的联系。在英国文学移民研究中，这些跨国概念空间在移民经历的文学表现及其在英国社会中的话语协商中的作用仍未得到广泛的研究。以前的研究主要集中于后殖民理论，以及与英联邦国家移民（及其后裔）有关的文本和背景。它特别关注种族主义、社会混乱和混合身份。在这里提出的项目中，小说和短篇故事将包括来自非英联邦国家的人物和没有移民经历的作者。因此，本项目对英国移民文学研究的创新贡献在于，与以往的研究相比，拓宽了研究范围，而且在主题和概念上也进行了扩展。

This project investigates the literary portrayal of experiences of migration in British prose fiction since World War II. Drawing on basic narratological text analysis as well as the sociological concept of transnational social spaces (Thomas Faist), the project will analyse novels and short stories with regard to their narrative techniques and cultural functions. Building on a broad understanding of migration as a process of spacial relocation of the place of residence, which involves transgressing socio-political and cultural borders (Ingrid Oswald), the project is organised on several interconnected levels of investigation. Firstly, we will examine which aspects and phases of migration phenomena are expressed in the texts at hand and which patterns and topics the corpus contains as a whole. Secondly, the narratological stratagies by which the texts represent the characters' experienced reality of migration will be at the centre of investigation. Thirdly, in the context of our theme-based and narratological assessment, our particular interest lies in the specific literary representation and evocation of transnational social spaces. The sociological term "transnational social spaces" denominates the various material, personal, symbolical and cultural ties established by migrants between their receiving country and their country of origin. Based on this concept, the central hypothesis of the project states that migration literature creates mental spaces in which the experienced realities of migrants is revealed to be, and imagined as, interconnected with other countries and cultures. In presenting the life and experiences of migrant characters, the novels and short stories evoke a connection between Great Britain and other realms of the world in the shape of lived and imagined cognitive-emotional relations with different characteristics and evaluations. The function of these transnational conceptual spaces within the literary presentation of migration experiences and their discursive negotiation in British society is still widely under-researched in English literary migration studies. Previous research focused primarily on post-colonial theory, as well as texts and contexts concerned with migrants (and their descendants) from Commonwealth countries. It paid special attention to racism, social dislocation and hybrid identities. Within the project proposed here, novels and short stories featuring characters coming from non-Commonwealth countries and authors without migration experience will be included. The innovative contribution of this project to research on English migration literature thus consists in broadening the scope of study compared to previous research, but also in the thematic and the conceptual expansion of the subject matter.