A Comparative Study of the Polish Literature in the Polish-German Borderlands and the Polish Migrant Literature in Germany

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 23720167
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: European literature (English literature excluded)
• Research Institution: Kumamoto University (2014); Hokkaido University (2011-2013)
• Principal Investigator: INOUE Satoko 熊本大学, 文学部, 准教授 (20599469)
• Project Period (FY): 2011-04-28 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: ポーランド:ドイツ / 中・東欧文学 / 国境地帯 / 移動 / 国際研究者交流 / 国際情報交換 / 作家インタビュー / 流通

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This study was intended to examine how the northern and western Poland are depicted in literary works by the writers born in the Polish-German borderland in the late 1950s and the 1960s who later partly migrated to West Germany in the 1980s, focusing on first-person narratives in which the totalizing state-driven cultural vision and historical view are deconstructed from the perspective of the borderland. These Polish literary works, written in the second half of the 1980s to the 1990s, represent this borderlands region as a multilayered palimpsest in which multiple histories, cultures, and memories are inscribed atop one another. In this way, the writers considered here deconstruct totalizing border discourses. In addition, interviews with ten writers were held to provide the core of an oral archive containing discussion of the changed writing environment and opportunities for wider circulation after 1989 and their influences on the subject matters, themes, and narrative techniques.

Free Research Field

ドイツ語圏を含む中・東欧文学