Weltreiche : zur Darstellung prekärer Arbeit in zwei 'Hotelromanen' von Monica Ali und Ali Smith

  • Two British novels exemplify an observation made analysing a larger corpus of contemporary 'hotel novels': both Ali Smith's "Hotel World" (2002) and Monica Ali's "In the Kitchen" (2009) focus on the hotel as a precarious workplace, with women being most vulnerable to its exploitative structures. The Imperial Hotel in Ali's novel is an architectural relic from the British Empire; a setting, where the migrant workers' labour conditions become evident. The Global Hotel in Smith's novel synthesises globalised and local structures, for instance by subverting the function of a hotel as a guest house accommodating affluent customers from all over the world: a receptionist opens the doors to a homeless woman, while the ghost of a female worker killed in an accident haunts the Global Hotel. The hotel has long served as a political metaphor when it comes to criticising liberal migration politics - especially in Britain, which the conservative MP Kenneth Baker referred to as "a sovereign nation, not a hotel" in 1995. In 2004, Tony Blair - then Prime Minister - famously said that "[w]e will neither be fortress Britain, nor will we be an open house". This paper explores these dialectics of openness and closeness in hotel fiction with a focus on the depiction of labour.

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Metadaten
Author:Jana VolkmannGND
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-798194
ISBN:978-3-8498-1683-4
ISBN:978-3-8498-1838-8
ISBN:978-3-8498-1837-1
ISSN:0179-3780
Parent Title (French):Colloquium Helveticum : cahiers suisses de littérature générale et comparée / publ. par l'Association Suisse de Littérature Générale et Comparée
Publisher:Aisthesis
Place of publication:Bielefeld
Document Type:Article
Language:German
Date of Publication (online):2023/11/27
Year of first Publication:2022
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2024/01/22
Tag:Ali, Monica: In the kitchen; Smith, Ali: Hotel world
GND Keyword:Smith, Ali; Ali, Monica; Hotel <Motiv>; Arbeit <Motiv>; Prekariat <Motiv>; Globalisierung
Volume:51
Page Number:18
First Page:177
Last Page:189
Dewey Decimal Classification:8 Literatur / 80 Literatur, Rhetorik, Literaturwissenschaft / 800 Literatur und Rhetorik
8 Literatur / 82 Englische, altenglische Literaturen / 820 Englische, altenglische Literaturen
Sammlungen:CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft / Aisthesis Verlag
Zeitschriften / Jahresberichte:Colloquium Helveticum / Literarische Glokalisierung = Glocalisation littéraire = Literary glocalization (Colloquium Helveticum ; 51.2022)
:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-473677
Licence (German):License LogoCreative Commons - CC BY-SA - Namensnennung - Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 4.0 International