Telling Stories To Survive: The Writings of Saša Stanišić. An Approach To Decolonizing Discourses In German Studies
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Date
2024-01-10
Authors
Klueppel, Joscha
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
This dissertation project is the first comprehensive analysis of Saša Stanišić. It transcends the valid, but restricting focus on migration in his works by tracing a common narrative strategy that spans all his writing. Analyzing his novels as well as two short stories of Fallensteller (2016), I argue that characters and narrators use storytelling as a means of survival. A detailed literary analysis, based on close readings of the engagement with death both as a narrative trigger and a constant negotiation, discusses a multitude of diegetic examples in which storytelling is used as survival strategy, for example in the mediation through bodies of water. Importantly, the focus of my analysis remains on the diegetic level to avoid conflating literary analysis with author biography. Detailed discussions of racism, colonial remnants in Germany as well as the power of naming and language are paired with examples from Stanišić’s texts to illustrate hierarchical and racializing mechanisms in German society. Utilizing the concept of borderscaping, the next chapter highlights how Stanišic’s texts provide solutions to the problem of exclusionary borderscapes. I argue that Stanišić’s texts rewrite and expand notions of Germanness to more adequately inform belonging to Germany and create more representative and less violent borderscapes. For this purpose, I discuss Stanišić’s idiosyncratic idea of Heimaten and themes that I term ‘transeuropean inscriptions.’ Furthermore, I understand the analysis of Stanišić’s novels as a paradigmatic example for the application of decolonizing conversations in German Studies. I do not claim Stanišić as a decolonial writer nor his texts as decolonial texts. Instead, my research places several lineages of knowledge production into conversation with Western thought to critique, decenter, and, at times, deconstruct, the mechanisms that the analysis of Stanišić’s writing unearthed. Centering non-hierarchical conversations is essential. To that end, I employ what I call decolonial couplets to engage with thinkers like Édouard Glissant and Achille Mbembe and the particularities of their approaches to similar themes and topics, such as lineage, memory, violence, and knowledge.
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Keywords
Decolonial Couplet, Decolonization, German literature, Saša Stanišić, Storytelling, Transeuropean