Fellow project: "Paradigmatic Crossings: Refugee Narratives in German-language Literature and Culture of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries"
At the core of this study is the investigation of how narratives are formulated around the figure of the refugee in German-language literary texts from the First World War to the present. The study treats the legibility and narrativity of refugees as interrelated problems in both fictional and non-fictional efforts to plot different refugee stories. With a primary focus on core elements of narrative fiction, the study compares fictional and non-fictional texts in order to uncover the specific features of German-language literary refugee narratives. For the construction of refugee narratives relies upon acts of figuration to imagine expulsion from normative social and political frameworks as well as escape across geopolitical borders and integration in the host countries. Literary texts offer a unique forum in which to reflect upon or ascribe new semantic values to already existing topological and topographic distributions of the political world, in which case refugees barred from familiar symbolic spheres of speech and action are able to accrue new significance through the modeling activity of literary narrative. My study's goal is to use its corpus of literary refugee narratives to identify a range of paradigms of refugee crossings in German-language literature.