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BIRCH ROOTS AND BRICKS: FINDING HOME IN THE PLURALISM OF VOICE IN MIGRATION NOVELS OF CONTEMPORARY EUROPE by Dorothea Trotter A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Dorothy L. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, FL August 2015 Copyright 2015 by Dorothea Trotter ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to everyone who made it possible for me to study abroad while successfully completing my requirements for an MA in Comparative Literature. At Florida Atlantic University, I thank my sponsor, Professor Dr. Berlatsky for his contribution to and support for my project. I am grateful for his knowledge of the field, his timely and constructive criticism, and his freeness with books and reading suggestions. I also wish to thank the members of my committee, Dr. Marcella Munson and Dr. Prisca Augustyn for their valuable participation and insights. More personally, I wish to thank my cousin three times removed (or something like that), Verena Kunath, for her sympathy and support while trying to complete this project while in Hamburg. I also want to thank my father for his silent, but strong support, as well as the MicrosoftWord and printing answers. I need to thank my brother, Genya, for his support as well. Even if it was more silent than Papa’s, I know I always have it. Finally, I need to thank meine Mama for her patience, guidance, and understanding. I am grateful for her shared invaluable knowledge of literature, insight across the field, and experience in applying it through interpretation. She both supported and motivated me to finish this project. iv ABSTRACT Author: Dorothea Trotter Title: Birch Roots and Bricks: Finding Home in the Pluralism of Voice in Migration Novels of Contemporary Europe Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. Eric Berlatsky Degree: Master of Arts Year: 2015 Through a comparative literary study of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and Olga Grjasnova’s Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt, this thesis concludes that although the migrant experience is heterogeneous and that integration is a difficult process that varies through the diversity of experiences, these experiences can be unified by the common way in which migrants learn to “belong” by connecting with voices of the past and present and by building and maintaining relationships that extend beyond the limits of place. In defending this argument, the thesis draws upon themes of Bakhtinian heteroglossia, nationalism and transnationalism, space, globalism, and migration. v BIRCH ROOTS AND BRICKS: FINDING HOME IN THE PLURALISM OF VOICE IN MIGRATION NOVELS OF CONTEMPORARY EUROPE Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: A Lane of Voices: Internal Transformation in Diasporic Space ................ 21 Part One: Individual in Plurality ................................................................................... 24 Part Two: Brick Lane as contact zone ........................................................................... 29 Part Three: Nazneen and Bakhtin- Verbal contact zones .............................................. 30 Part Four: Words ........................................................................................................... 34 Part Five: Brick-by-brick, moving through the layers of discourse .............................. 38 Part Six: The Significance of Space .............................................................................. 45 Part Seven: Nationals .................................................................................................... 49 Part Eight: Conclusion .................................................................................................. 52 Chapter Two: Cracking the Hazelnut and Looking Beyond the Shell: “Rootlessness,” Discourse, and Transnationalism ...................................................................................... 55 Part One: The word as a foreign object ......................................................................... 60 Part Two: Translation/Interpretation ............................................................................. 65 Part Three: Self-consciously national and adamantly not ............................................. 66 Part Four: Identity, Structures, Discourse- Germany .................................................... 68 Part Five: Discourse of Pain .......................................................................................... 72 Part Six: Painful Roots .................................................................................................. 79 Part Seven: Conclusion ................................................................................................. 81 Conclusion- Neither Fiction nor Voices Remain within their Borders ............................. 91 Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 101 vi INTRODUCTION My name is Karim Amir. I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. -From Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi Few other lines of literature stick with me in the same way as Hanif Kureishi’s opening line to The Buddha of Suburbia. In this statement, Karim claims a national identity in a way that I never could, but most that most people do as part of their tendency to “symboliz[e] parts of the complex of images that are likewise recognizable by others” (Adler). The opposition against an “other” is key to how we identify ourselves, even in a postmodern world. Most famously, Benedict Anderson explains this phenomenon in his book Imagined Communities. Part of our attachment to nationality, he says, has to do with the way nationality, “nation-ness,” and nationalism command “powerful emotional legitimacy” (4). On the other hand, with the qualifier “almost” Kureishi undermines the security of the character’s identity and opens up a literary conversation about identity, culture, language, and nationality, feeding into larger philosophical, theoretical, sociological and political discussions that have occupied me since I have started thinking about the world and the way it “works.” To begin with, language is the result of social relations; it is a social construct and a phenomenon which occurs because humans are social beings. Literature reflects this aspect of language most clearly. By studying German, English and Russian literature in lingua and in translation, I learned that to study literature is to study a myriad of factors which make up the human existence and makes literary interpretation far more than an analysis of words, symbols, and metaphors. During these years, I also discovered that language is a strong unifying factor in culture and nationality, and aided by theorists like Lev Vygotsky, Walter Benjamin, and Noam Chomsky, I found better ways to describe the relationship between language and culture. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis was especially important in convincing me that learning another language means learning another way of being. Subsequently, Benjamin’s famous statement “the limits of my language are the limits of my world” meant that if I could only speak German or English, I would only know the German or English “world.” The Hypothesis, developed by socio-linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, is a theory of language relativity which supposes that language affects a person’s perception of the external world. With language, we can enter an interactional space whereby language becomes an abstract system. Our ability to talk about language presupposes that it is concrete, but one must “focus on language as a set of symbolic resources that enter the constitution of social fabric and the individual representation of actual or possible world” (Duranti 3). Language is in constant flux based on relationships. Therefore, language and culture are bound closely together. Different languages exist, not just because of the different morphemes, lexemes, and phonemes which make up a sentence, but because each group who uses the sentence is different. Also, since an utterance is intimately linked to the identity of the speaker, one has to consider the individual’s relationship with his/her “group.” Since literature is perhaps the best way to express identity, it will reflect the language and culture which make up that identity. Thus, I argue that one should understand literature at the intersection of language, culture, and identity: 2 (designed by D. Trotter) On the other hand, postcolonial and poststructuralist theorists remind one that one must also learn to respect the possibilities within Benjamin’s “limits,” because the possibilities within a language are endless. Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, Homi Bhabha, and Guattari Chakravorty Spivak help explain that there are thousands of overlapping voices in language, power structures that control what I can or cannot have access to, heterogeneity in its use, and that even the silences need to be examined for what is left unsaid. Thus, language is in a constant state of flux based on inter- and intralingual relationships. When people explain why they continue their education beyond their compulsory education or desire to find better employment opportunities, they most often evoke the desire to understand how the world is organized. Those who chose to study literature usually recognize literature as a way of organizing

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