Migrations: Literary and Linguistic Aspects

The literary section of this book opens with Pierre Lurbe’s chapter “Of Lice and Men: The Palatine Emigration to Britain, 1709.” Lurbe explores the issue of “the Poor Palatines,” or over 10,000 German refugees who made their way to England from south-western Germany over the spring and early summer of 1709. The author demonstrates how the sudden influx of thousands of immigrants took the British authorities by surprise and triggered an intensely polarizing national debate, which exacerbated political and religious differences. At one extreme, the anonymous author of a particularly abusive satirical tract referred to the Palatines as “lice”; at the other extreme, the Bishop of Oxford called his flock to exercise Christian charity towards these fellow “men.” Lurbe suggests that various, conflicting narratives were attempts to come to grips with and make sense of one of the most important migrations within Europe in the early modern period.

In “The Irish and the Croats in the Great Migration: A Comparative Perspective,” Jelena Šesnić offers a comparative perspective on the process of the Great Migration overtaking in the course of the 19th century the Irish and incorporating the Croats at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is contended that despite their telling differences, both migrations led to the creation of considerable diasporas in North America while exhibiting along the way some common features allowing us to place these migratory trails in the context of the global core-periphery model, as well as placing the acculturation process in the ambit of contemporary social studies theories. Šesnić argues that both migrations led to the creation of considerable diasporas in North America, as exemplified by Colum McCann’s novel Transatlantic (2013) and Mary Helen Stefaniak’s novel The Turk and My Mother (2004).

Monika Bregović and Mia Žulić in their chapter entitled “Belonging Nowhere: Displacement in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger” discuss the issue of displacement in John Osborne’s famous play by focusing on the historical context in which the play emerged. By highlighting the social and political issues, such as class inequality and lack of belief in national ideology, present in the post-WWII Britain, the authors argue that the feelings of displacement expressed in the play reflect the general sentiment of the period. The issue of non-belonging, which accounts for the popularity of the play with contemporary audiences, is presented as a product of colonial migration, preservation of class privilege regardless of Socialist reforms, and the absence of national goals.

In “Tainted Identity: Immigrant Condition and Englishness in Muriel Spark’s ‘The Black Madonna’,” Armela Panajoti explores the issue of migration by analysing Muriel Spark’s short story “The Black Madonna,” which deals with issues of mixed race and national identity in the chronotope of the 1950s England. In the story, the birth of a black baby girl reveals the covert racism of her white parents, who decide to give her up for adoption. The skin colour of the baby, indicating a hidden genetic heritage, subverts the notion of race as a fixed category and reveals the multiculturalism and hybridity inherent to English identity. The author points out that the short story might be viewed as affirming the notion of Englishness as encompassing many cultures, identities, and realities, thereby challenging the idea of purity when it comes to identity.

In “On Mothers, Daughters and Black Scottish Identity in Jackie Kay’s The Adoption Papers,” Vesna Ukić Košta discusses Jackie Kay’s 1991 semi-autobiographical sequence of poems The Adoption Papers. In the sequence, Kay re-visits imaginatively what her own adoption process might have been like and addresses the formation of the highly complex identity of a transracial adoptee in a predominantly white Scottish community. The chapter focuses on how the multi-voice representation (as Kay employs three distinctive voices throughout the poems: those of the birth mother, the adoptive mother, and the daughter who has been given up for adoption) tackles identity formation which has been in/directly influenced by migration and argues that identity resulting from the “zone of contact” raises a plethora of questions concerning race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality.

In her chapter, “Displacement and Borders in the Artwork of Tanja Ostojić and Bern O’Donoghue”, Elena Marchevska focuses on the issue of migration by analysing the performances and artworks of two artists, Tanja Ostojić and Bern O’Donoghue, which are relevant for contemporary migration crises. While Tanja Ostojić’s “Displaced Women” constructs the in-between space of the border by the performer’s act of packing and unpacking in public, Bern O’Donoghue’s “Dead Reckoning” seeks to humanize the individuals who have died during migration, instead of viewing them merely in terms of statistics. Both authors include audiences in their work in order to make them more sensitive to the suffering of the migrants and counter their objectification by the mainstream media, which often present the migrants as a threat to European security.

The chapter entitled “Reading Frankenstein in the light of the immigration crisis” by Martina Domines Veliki discusses the similarities between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Elke Sasse’s documentaries My Escape 1 & 2 in order to highlight the persistence of the fear of the other in the Western imaginary. By using Kristeva’s theory of abjection, the chapter argues that Victor in Frankenstein recognizes the same threat of breaking the borders in the monster as Europe recognizes the threat of the immigrants crossing its borders. DominesVeliki claims that the story of Frankenstein persists in our culture because Frankenstein is the most powerful metaphor for our contemporary society unwilling to show compassion and take action.

Ana Popović in “Amal Kassir: Word Versus Weapons” examines so-called Mahjar poetry, which includes “literature of the Arab diasporic writers in America,” by focusing on the slam poetry of Amal Kassir, a second-generation immigrant with Syrian background. The genre of slam is particularly suitable for giving a voice to the underprivileged, as it subverts the established conventions of high literature. Kassir’s poetry works to subvert the binary between the two worlds commonly perceived as opposites, the Arab and the Western one, by tackling issues such as gender, religion, belonging, and terrorism. The author argues that Kassir’s poetry overcomes its culture-specific context in order to address oppression as a universal issue.

Snežana Kalinić analyses several literary representations of illusory return from exile and various kinds of non-belonging, all of which demonstrate Edward Said’s claim that “homecoming is out of the question.” The chapter titled “Exile as a ‘One-way Trip’: Illusory Return in Charles Baudelaire, Isidora Sekulić, Thomas Bernhard and Milan Kundera” explores Baudelaire’s poem “The Swan,” Kundera’s novel Ignorance, Bernhard’s play Heldenplatz, and Isidora Sekulić’s travelogue Letters from Norway in the light of Said’s Reflections on Exile. Kalinić points out that instead of an authentic return from enforced exile, Baudelaire’s, Kundera’s, and Bernhard’s texts address various kinds of impossible return, while Sekulić’s Letters articulate a constantly postponed return from the voluntary exile.

The second part of the book concerned with linguistic aspects of migrations starts with Gašper Ilc’s chapter “Migrations across Authors or Clarissa Goes West: Identifying Intertextual Links between Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours.” The chapter analyses two literary extracts from two narratives – Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Cunningham’s The Hours – in terms of intertextuality. The central aim of the chapter is to identify linguistic factors that facilitate intertextuality. For the purposes of the analysis, the two extracts have been processed by two automated text-analysis tools: Complete Lexical Tutor version 8 and Coh-Metrix Version 3.0. The results of the automated text-analysis show that the intertextual links between the two texts are established predominantly at the level of the story line and vocabulary selection. At the structural and discoursive level, however, Cunningham’s deviation from Woolfian narrative technique and style can be observed. As a result, the extract from The Hours can be seen as a good example of hybridization, which is typical of postmodernist authors who create new narratives by combining, rearranging, and modifying different elements and narrative modes/techniques from previously existing texts.

Lieven Buysse in “English in 21st Century Europe: A Language on the Move for People on the Move”, points out that English has become a widespread means of communication between people who do not share the same mother tongue. On the one hand, this practice – which has even been claimed to constitute a distinct variety of English – has posed a challenge to the notion of standard in English in general and more specifically for foreign language learners of English. On the other hand, English is not only used for tourist, academic, and business purposes, but also serves as a broker of communication for “newcomers” in European countries, which does not necessarily uphold the image of English as the language of opportunity.

Anna Martinović and Dino Dumančić, in their chapter “Crossing Borders with ELF: A Study on Learning and Using English among Erasmus Students,” analyse students’ motivation to learn and use English as an L2 and to explore their ELF identity while they were participating in their student exchange programmes in Europe. The introduction of the Bologna process to European universities has stimulated the movement of students through various student exchange programmes, such as the Erasmus programme. Although the European Union encourages multilingualism, the use of English, which has become the world’s lingua franca, is the most dominant. Today, English is viewed as an indispensable tool for speakers who differ in language and cultural background, and yet want to establish a meaningful communication. The focus of the chapter is on several variables, including motivation to learn English, L2 self-concept (ideal L2 self), L2 anxiety, English speaking self-efficacy, as well as ELF identity. The results show that students were generally motivated to learn and use English, with females showing higher levels of motivation compared to males. Students’ ELF identity was connected to their perceptions of themselves as global citizens, and they did not perceive it as a threat to their L1 identity and viewed the use of ELF as an opportunity to acquire new knowledge and develop as individuals.

Marina Bokšić and Ivo Fabijanić, in “Semantic Adaptation of Turkisms in the Vrgorac Dialect,” analyse the contact between the Turkish language and a Croatian dialect spoken in the town of Vrgorac, Croatia. Turkish words were borrowed during the Ottoman occupation, which lasted for more than two centuries. Many of the lexemes changed their meanings after being adapted into the system of the receiving language, which was the main reason for analysing them on the semantic level. Turkisms under analysis were grouped into semantic fields of animals, clothes, everyday activities, food, household, plants, and tools, and analysed according to the degrees of semantic adaptation, i.e. into those that were adapted by a) zero extension, b) restriction of meaning in number or field, and c) expansion of meaning in number or field.

The chapter “From Writing to Speech – an Optimality Theoretic Approach to Formation of Acronyms” by Frane Malenica discusses the possibilities of analysing formation of English acronyms within the framework of Optimality Theory. The absence of systematic distribution of abbreviations into their respective types with clear-cut delineation between the categories is best reflected in the fact that scholars often fail to distinguish between abbreviations that are pronounced as single words (acronyms) and those pronounced letter-by-letter (initialisms/alphabetisms). The aim of the chapter is to show how the creation of acronyms, despite their apparent unpredictable features, is nevertheless a result of interaction of specific morphological and prosodic constraints and that the system of constraints provided by the Optimality Theory can help shed some light on their creation.

We are hopeful that this volume might be of interest to scholars, researchers, and students interested in various literary and/or linguistic aspects of migrations, especially in the area of English language and literature. Finally, we would like to thank all our contributors for making this volume a small contribution to the study of migration, a phenomenon which nowadays happens to be more current than ever.