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SECTION:
Writing in the Migration: Literature and Cultural Contexts (of Romance Area)
Chair of the section/Suggestions, Abstracts, Contributions to:
Email: Klaus-Dieter Ertler (Aachen/Graz)
ABSTRACT: To observe connecting transnational elements in the literary system, is one of the most important purposes of the contemporary literary critic. By the fact of growing importance of Migration Literatures, which are the results of the global streams of mobility, it has become necessary today to observe and to describe metacultural phenomenons of this character.
How is it possible to seize artistic entities in the complex forms of communication of our days and how can we discover their connecting transnational elements. We can start with a narratology, which can give an account of the aspects of the Other in the Own, or the use of "other" cultural patterns in the own language, or vice versa. In this observation, the different possibilities for narration in constructing reality take an important place.
Concerning narratology, literatures of migration have a specific character. On the one hand, they are resourcing themselves in the retrospective view at past cultural areas of the writer, which do not correspond with his actual surrounding and take this for a permanent re-narration. The tension raised by these different perspectives is generating interesting gaps, which can be constituent for the specific aesthetics of these literatures. On the other hand, they are raising the problems of Otherness und the integration of the other in its new environment.
We have to see in what way the simultaneousness of no simultaneousness is operating in the narrative systems of Romance literatures and how it manifests itself in the specific texts. To seize the problem in a broader way, it is possible to follow the systemic paradigm, whose central theoretical proposition is to reduce complexity for getting new possibilities of connections. The reduction can be realized in different manners, for example, by the integration of sociological parameters as they are demonstrated in the Gilbert Durand's book Les structures anthropologiques de l'Imaginaire (Paris: Dunod 1969). Durand has shown the constant features of the work of art and contributed in this way to a new accessibility to main patterns of interculturality.
In the work of Gilbert Durand, the symbols of numerous cultures are interrelated and reduced to the smallest common denominator. The far-reaching results of the French sociologies can be applicated to literary texts, in particular to texts with a migratory background, to make evident the inter- und intracultural functions.
Our corpus will be composed of short stories and novels, written in the language of the "Other", in the language of the new environment. It should be demonstrated, in what way cultural relations, but also ruptures and dissonances, are manifest in a metaphorical and symbolic level and how are expressed the literary phenomenons in different cultural contexts.
In that way, a central aspect of the function of culture in contemporary processes - especially the aspect concerning the connecting transnational elements - shall be considered and described.
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