(IR)Reverently Telling the Otherness through Paratextual Narrative

Abstract

An inherent component of relocation narratives is the description of the protagonists’ process of building up their intercultural competence - whose range will vary from one expatriate narrator to another. Closely connected to all the four types of cultural intelligence (CQ), in general, and to the metacognitive CQ, in particular, the account of the sojourn in foreign lands conjures up a raft of reflections on what exactly gives one the sense of cultural belonging. Noticing the difference, analysing it, integrating or dismissing it are as many steps taken during/after cross-cultural interactions. This paper addresses the verbalisation of the cultural differences in accounts that sometimes embrace and other times reject them, by resorting to risqué language in snide remarks meant to perform an evaluation of the received ideas in relation to both the native and the host country of the expatriate. The corpus examined is the construction of the paratext prefiguring the spot-on satire comprised by the text.

Keywords

• relocation narrative
• cultural assumptions
• derisive witticism
• peritext
• epitext