Description

Narratives At the Margins of Europe (NAME) studies the contribution of peripheral European literatures to the formation and circulation of critical imaginaries of the continent from the 1990s to the present. Focusing on literary works beyond the dominant Western European traditions and languages the project seeks to explore the poetics and circulation paths of a selected corpus of consolidated and new, emergent authors writing at the margins of Europe.

The project works with a multilingual and multigeographical corpus and theoretical framework and criticism to consider the European peripheral regions as a productive literary space from which to contest current homogeneous ideas of the continent.

The perspective from less circulated European literatures, with a special focus on Southern and Eastern  Europe, will help us reconsider the profound asymmetries that Eurocentrism and a globalized literary market project into our understanding of transcultural relations on a regional and global scale.

We will also attend to diasporic, displaced, migrant, and border narratives within and outside the continent and their important intervention in the destabilization of inherited notions about Europe and Europeanness. As these narratives create new transnational imaginaries that the project aims to explore, they reconfigure inherited representations of the Mediterranean and the former Eastern Bloc while also contributing to theories of narrative writing that bridge Iberian, Southern, and East-Central European Studies. 

SPECIFIC GOALS:

The main goal of the NAME project is to advance knowledge in the fields of European Studies, Comparative Literature, and Global Literary Studies in at least four ways: 

1. Introducing a more integrated and decentralized perspective in the study of smaller literatures and less widely translated European authors and the contested imaginaries about Europe that they produce. 

2. Mapping the uneven circulation of these literary works through the study of translation, transnational critical reception, and consecration following the work of our previous I+D GlobalNovel project (PID2020-118610GA-I00). 

3. Crossing narratological, comparative, and sociological approaches to a varied range of contemporary literary narratives beyond the novel in order to better understand how these peripheralized works contribute to reimagine Europe through specific exploratory poetics.

4. Identifying a constellation of social, political, affective, generic, and formal concerns that set the grounds for a poetics of the European narratives of the margins.

REFERENCE: PID2023-152619NB-I00

FUNDING: Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, the State Research Agency and the European Regional Development Fund (MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER,EU).

DURATION: 2024 – 2027

This research project is based in the Arts and Humanities Department at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Campus UOC. Rambla del Poblenou, 156. 08018 Barcelona (SPAIN).