UNSELFING NARRATIVES. Altered Selves of Post-Soviet Migrants in German-Postmigrant Literatures 

This ongoing PhD project investigates unsettled subjectivities of post-Soviet migrants and their literary depictions in contemporary German literatures. A remarkable cadre of novels with altered self-experiences of protagonists with Soviet-Jewish and Soviet-German origins has recently emerged on the German literary market. The unsettled subjectivities of the so-called Post-Ost generation 1,5 (Panagiotidis & Petersen 2024) oscillate between modes of cognitive corporeal entrapment of the persistent post-Soviet coloniality of being (Tlostanova 2015) on the one hand, and of the anti-east European racism and German ethno-national integration project on the other. The phenomenological lens of unselfing that this PhD research develops helps conceptualize and explore the nature of self-altering experiences and their literary depiction within intersectional postcolonial-postmigrant corpo-realities.

Cognitive-corporeal narratives of altered selves draw attention to emerging literary forms of decolonial/de-migrating subjects. Novels such as Slata Roschal’s 153 formen des nichtseins (2022), Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Ausser Sich (2017), Lena Gorelik’s Wer wir sind (2021), and Artur Weigandt’s Die Verräter (2023) ponder the experience of disturbed ipseity-concepts (Parnass 2008) and literary experiments of diverse intersubjectivity. Drawing on insights from cognitive phenomenology (Gallagher & Zahavi 2021; Parnass 2008) and cognitive narratology (Kukkonen 2022; Alber&Wenzel 2021) the study investigates corporeal sensitivities of the Post-Ost generation in Germany and provides a conceptual-phenomenological lens. Simultaniously, it explores cognitive patterns and literary representations of self-perception in diverse intersections of post-Soviet and postmigrant experiences.

Keywords: Post-Ost • unselfing • altered self • cognitive narratology • cognitive phenomenology • German postmigrant literatures • post-Soviet migration • Sasha Marianna Salzmann • Slata Roschal • Lena Gorelik • Artur Weigandt