Stranded Dialogue: Identity, Memory and the English Channel
Taking a geocritical approach, this project focuses on 20th and 21st-century British fiction and travel writing set in and around the English Channel. As a subproject of the SNSF-research project “British Literary and Cultural Discourses of Europe”, it examines how the Channel has been constructed, represented and contested as an Anglo-French and British-European ‘border zone’.
The English Channel positioned Britain towards Europe in a very particular way – not just geologically speaking. As Christopher L. Connery succinctly put it: “Britain’s island character, in Europe but not of it and thus de-continentalized, had been a significant part of its own geomythology” (Connery 2001: 187). British discourses of Europe that focus on establishing difference and on processes of othering thus tend to represent the English Channel as a fixed line between two territories. While literary narratives have often played a crucial role in consolidating and reproducing the Channel as a symbol of insularity, they have also creatively engaged with the ambivalence and blurriness of the Channel border.
In my exploration of the border as a contact zone I suggest moving away from a literary analysis that differentiates between “us” and “them” and instead expanding on Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever’s approach in The Literary Channel, which Emily Apter summarised in the collection’s afterword: “The […] emphasis on the Channel rather than on the discretely bounded territory of the nation-state shifts the focus away from influence studies and toward a paradigm of ‘Anglo-Euro’ cultural topography that questions the very ground of cross-cultural comparison” (Apter in Cohen/Dever 2002: 286). It will also be important to examine the changing cultural significance of the Channel for identity constructions in the light of what Christopher L. Connery called the “technological transcendence of the earth/sea binary” (Connery 2001: 192). I thus aim to investigate how the Channel has been constructed, represented and imagined as a material presence and three-dimensional[1] space that allows a critical engagement with Britain’s position within Europe and a reflection on British-European contacts and relations.
The project investigates how the English Channel provides the creative means to show that a cultural space – even if conflated with the geological space of an island – is never a clearly bounded system, but is subject to constant transgression. Close attention will be paid to travel writing, as it provides valuable insights into individual border experiences. Novels about the wartime occupation of the Channel Islands will also be considered. The Channel Islands’ liminal position, both geographically and in the British cultural memory of World War II, make them an attractive setting for literary explorations of cultural hybridity and intercultural tensions. A further focus will be on literary and cultural responses to the dynamic between an increasingly borderless Europe, symbolised by transnational connections such as the Channel Tunnel, and a rise in nationalism and localism.
[1] As Stuart Elden claims, “[w]e all-too-often think of the spaces of geography as areas, not volumes. Territories are bordered, divided and demarcated, but not understood in terms of height and depth” (Elden 2013: 1).
