Six key texts by contemporary women writers are read afresh by leading critics, using insights from poststructuralist and new materialist feminist theory. Ingeborg Bachmann, Christa Wolf, and ...Elfriede Jelinek have long been prominent in the fields of Austrian modernism, GDR writing, and avant-garde Austrian literature. The innovative work of Anne Duden, Herta Müller, and Emine Sevgi Özdamar sets out to challenge dominant models of German identity. Focusing on the body and suffering, they explore textual representations of trauma, national identity, and displacement. Haines and Littler's readings of these distinguished and complex female authors offer new avenues for discussion. Both critics and their subjects cast a sceptical eye over existing notions of subjectivity in relation to language, gender, and race. Together, they spark controversy and comment, in an increasingly important debate.
This volume is a critical companion to the works of Herta Müller, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009. Müller (1953-) is a Romanian-German novelist, essayist and producer of collages ...whose work has been compared with that of W.G. Sebald and Franz Kafka. The Nobel Committee described her as a writer ‘who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed’. In works such as Niederungen (Nadirs), Herztier (The Land of Green Plums), Reisende auf einem Bein (Traveling on One Leg), and Atemschaukel (The Hunger Angel), all written in German but translated worldwide, Müller addresses vital contemporary issues such as dictatorship, migration, memory, and the ongoing legacy of fascist and communist rule in Europe. Her works are written in a rich, poetic language which imbues them with great power and depth. They exceed national boundaries and have universal appeal; they speak to a global audience attuned to political oppression and its lasting effects. This volume, containing contributions by an international team of scholars, introduces the work of one of Europe’s foremost contemporary writers to a world audience. Individual chapters deal with Müller’s major works and her volumes of collages. Other chapters explore her poetics and the Romanian background as well as themes, such as gender and life writing, running throughout her work, and her worldwide reception through the media and the medium of translation.
This paper notes that recent fiction in German by writers from eastern Europe and former Yugoslavia constitutes a new wave of migrant writing in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It suggests a ...provisional unity to these texts based on the snapshot they provide of late-stage communism and the post-communist transformation of eastern and western Europe, focusing on five common scenarios. Yet the considerable areas of overlap with trends in other German-language literatures indicate that this literature cannot be labelled "marginal". Rather this emerging field is transforming German literatures from within and contributing to a post-Cold War remapping of Europe.
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This research was generously supported by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council under their Research Leave Scheme.
Taking as its starting point Vladimir Vertlib's noted ability to cross borders and represent otherness in his writing, the article examines this Russian-Austrian-Jewish author's use of narrative form ...in all his work to date. While his deceptively conventional realist narratives achieve provisional closure at the level of plot, they are structured so as to juxtapose voices, times and modes in a way which probes, but does not resolve, a range of contemporary problems. These concern migration (in Abschiebung and Zwischenstationen), memory, remembrance and twentieth-century European history (in Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur), Jewish identities and the negative German-Jewish symbiosis (in Letzter Wunsch), and the remembrance of the Third Reich in central Europe (in Mein erster Mörder and...und alle Toten starben friedlich...). Close readings reveal Vertlib's increasing integration into Austrian culture, while stressing the global import of his dialogism and border crossings. (Author abstract)
