Carolin Gebauer - Böcker

This volume offers new perspectives on the ways in which migrants use storytelling practices and kinship formations in order to navigate and modify spaces of sovereignty, and thus to re-write narratives portraying them as helpless and passive victims. It provides one of the first investigations that assembles multidisciplinary contributions to look beyond individual acts of migrant agency and toward the entanglements of individual and collective agency, formations of kinship structures, and feelings, expressions, and representations of community and (multiple) belonging(s).The contributions explore the interplay between agency, kinship, and migration from various fields, including sociology, psychology, philosophy, border studies, gender and queer studies, postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, film and media studies, and literary and cultural studies – with a special focus on interdisciplinary narrative theory. They address real and imagined assertions of migrant agency and kinship formations; draw on empirical research, interviews, and accounts of lived experiences; and analyze the role of narrative, media, and technologies in artistic, literary, and cinematic representations of migrant agency and kinship. By probing migrant identity discourses in different cultural and medial contexts, the contributions examine how narratives negotiate and challenge the unequal distribution of mobility, resources, and vulnerability that preconfigures many migrant lives; they also discuss narrative devices, storytelling techniques, and other representational strategies that migrants employ, as well as technologies that they draw on, to lay powerful claims on space and citizenship and to eschew established scripts of victimhood. As such, the volume addresses and embraces the tensions between vulnerability and agency that come to the fore when we try to understand the different ways in which migrants shape, and are shaped by, their (trans)local, material, economic, affective, social, cultural, and political realities.

This volume offers new perspectives on the ways in which migrants use storytelling practices and kinship formations in order to navigate and modify spaces of sovereignty, and thus to re-write narratives portraying them as helpless and passive victims. It provides one of the first investigations that assembles multidisciplinary contributions to look beyond individual acts of migrant agency and toward the entanglements of individual and collective agency, formations of kinship structures, and feelings, expressions, and representations of community and (multiple) belonging(s).The contributions explore the interplay between agency, kinship, and migration from various fields, including sociology, psychology, philosophy, border studies, gender and queer studies, postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, film and media studies, and literary and cultural studies – with a special focus on interdisciplinary narrative theory. They address real and imagined assertions of migrant agency and kinship formations; draw on empirical research, interviews, and accounts of lived experiences; and analyze the role of narrative, media, and technologies in artistic, literary, and cinematic representations of migrant agency and kinship. By probing migrant identity discourses in different cultural and medial contexts, the contributions examine how narratives negotiate and challenge the unequal distribution of mobility, resources, and vulnerability that preconfigures many migrant lives; they also discuss narrative devices, storytelling techniques, and other representational strategies that migrants employ, as well as technologies that they draw on, to lay powerful claims on space and citizenship and to eschew established scripts of victimhood. As such, the volume addresses and embraces the tensions between vulnerability and agency that come to the fore when we try to understand the different ways in which migrants shape, and are shaped by, their (trans)local, material, economic, affective, social, cultural, and political realities.

2023 Perkins Prize of the International Society for the Study of Narrative ESSE Book Award for Junior Scholars for a book in the field of Literatures in the English LanguageResponding to the current surge in present-tense novels, Making Time is an innovative contribution to narratological research on present-tense usage in narrative fiction. Breaking with the tradition of conceptualizing the present tense purely as a deictic category denoting synchronicity between a narrative event and its presentation, the study redefines present-tense narration as a fully-fledged narrative strategy whose functional potential far exceeds temporal relations between story and discourse. The first part of the volume presents numerous analytical categories that systematically describe the formal, structural, functional, and syntactic dimensions of present-tense usage in narrative fiction. These categories are then deployed to investigate the uses and functions of present-tense narration in selected twenty-first century novels, including Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Ian McEwan’s Nutshell, and Irvine Welsh’s Skagboys. The seven case studies serve to illustrate the ubiquity of present-tense narration in contemporary fiction, ranging from the historical novel to the thriller, and to investigate the various ways in which the present tense contributes to narrative worldmaking.

2023 Perkins Prize of the International Society for the Study of Narrative ESSE Book Award for Junior Scholars for a book in the field of Literatures in the English LanguageResponding to the current surge in present-tense novels, Making Time is an innovative contribution to narratological research on present-tense usage in narrative fiction. Breaking with the tradition of conceptualizing the present tense purely as a deictic category denoting synchronicity between a narrative event and its presentation, the study redefines present-tense narration as a fully-fledged narrative strategy whose functional potential far exceeds temporal relations between story and discourse. The first part of the volume presents numerous analytical categories that systematically describe the formal, structural, functional, and syntactic dimensions of present-tense usage in narrative fiction. These categories are then deployed to investigate the uses and functions of present-tense narration in selected twenty-first century novels, including Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Ian McEwan’s Nutshell, and Irvine Welsh’s Skagboys. The seven case studies serve to illustrate the ubiquity of present-tense narration in contemporary fiction, ranging from the historical novel to the thriller, and to investigate the various ways in which the present tense contributes to narrative worldmaking.