Berlatsky, Eric L.

Advances in literary studies have expanded the multitude of interpretations
possible of a single work, perhaps too far. Positive progress from here requires
constructing a way to avoid the chaos of an interpretive free- for-all without reverting to
the debunked, totali zing systems of old. Limiting Interpretive Possibilities finds in Italo
Calvina's If on a winter's night a traveler and Samuel Beckett's Molloy, Malone Dies,
and The Unnamable the model for a combinatorial literature that respects the key,
inalienable elements of author, reader, work, and universe. Any reading that fits into this
framework is a "possible" interpretation of the work, while readings that deny one or
more of these elements are " impossible." Ultimately, a literary work has room for all its
possible interpretations, which co-exist in a combinatorial manner that accounts for even
interpretations that have yet to emerge, ensuring that no new way of reading will
fundamentally alter the original work.

Through a comparative literary study of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and Olga Grjasnova’s Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt, this thesis concludes that although the migrant experience is heterogeneous and that integration is a difficult process that varies through the diversity of experiences, these experiences can be unified by the common way in which migrants learn to “belong” by connecting with voices of the past and present and by building and maintaining relationships that extend beyond the limits of place. In defending this argument, the thesis draws upon themes of Bakhtinian heteroglossia, nationalism and transnationalism, space, globalism, and migration.