Ukrainian women emigrants in the "literature of migration": literary narratives through a linguistic lens

Abstract

This dissertation explores evaluations of Ukrainian emigration and women emigrants in works of fiction. Between 2000 and 2013, more than 20 literary works representing contemporary women’s writing about Ukrainian women’s emigration were published both in Ukraine and abroad. These women-authored and women-centred publications represent a new trend in Ukrainian literature, and Adelson’s (2005) term “literature of migration” is proposed to describe and analyze this recent literary phenomenon. The concept “literature of migration” separates this literary corpus from the corpus of emigration (diaspora) literature of the twentieth century by placing focus on main characters and common topics, rather than genre, authors’ emigration status, their ethnicity, and the language of writing. This study aims to reveal how evaluative meanings shape the depiction of Ukrainian emigration and women emigrants in Ukrainian literature of migration by employing Appraisal Theory (Martin et al, 2005; White, 2015) and subjecting excerpts from the following five novels to an in-depth linguistic analysis: Usi dorohy vedut’ do Rymu by Halych (2004), Shliub iz kukhlem Pil’zens’koho pyva by Stepovychka (2007), Ia znaiu, shcho ty znaiesh, shcho ia znaiu by Rozdobud’ko (2011), Hastarbaiterky by Doliak (2012), and Korotka istoriia traktoriv poukraiins’ky by Lewycka (2013). The authors employ various grammatical and lexical items to “transmit their assessments” (White, 2015, p.1) of the emigrant women characters and the phenomenon of emigration from Ukraine. Appraisal Theory allows to identify such linguistic realizations of evaluations and interpret “attitudes, judgement and emotive responses” (White, 2015, p.1) voiced or implied in text. This research is significant as the first study of its kind using Appraisal Theory to analyze literary texts written in Ukrainian thus expanding the theory’s reach and relevance. Additionally, the present study draws on scholarship from the fields of migration, political science, sociology, and anthropology to contextualize Ukrainian fiction by discussing socio-political trends and tendencies in emigration and migration studies. The findings of this research contribute to the fields of literary studies, linguistics, and migration studies.