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This new assessment of the literary development of Irmtraud Morgner (1933-1990) liberates her from a critical straitjacket that has seen her early and middle-period works as essentially constrained and thwarted by state prescriptions. The author demonstrates that Morgner always had an organically evolving literary programme of her own. He uncovers a writer with a vision of ideology and democracy as humanised, intimate and personal. Morgner's diaries are called upon to demonstrate how she rechannelled into her later work material that had been banned by the censor. Morgner emerges as a figure whose work is deeply pertinent to our twenty-first-century preoccupations, be they in the West or East. The author advances powerful arguments for the value of six of her novels as key illustrations of her trust in the individual's capacity to give meaning to life without recourse to established ideological structures.
Geoffrey Westgate offers a new understanding of Irmtraud Morgner by reading her as a specifically East German writer. The book examines the literary strategies Morgner adopted with respect to pivotal cultural-political developments in the GDR. The study considers Morgner's career as a whole and uncovers texts which have not appeared in bibliographies of her writings and draws on new biographical material, including the writer's Nachlass."
This book offers a thorough examination of the novels of Irmtraud Morgner (1933-1990), one of the most talented, compelling and overlooked writers within East German feminist and avant-garde circles. Using a combination of theoretical approaches - including Adorno's aesthetic theories and Bakhtinian analyses of dialogism and the carnivalesque - the author traces Morgner's engagement with postmodernist aesthetic strategies back to her efforts, beginning in the early 1970s, to pose questions about effective political practices. Morgner's work sheds new light on the fraught relationship between GDR intellectuals and the state, a hotly debated topic that marks most recent attempts to understand literary culture in the German Democratic Republic. Situating Morgner's fiction at the intersection of postmodern and feminist theory, this study also offers new evidence for viewing literature from the GDR as significantly more complex and aesthetically interesting than has been previously assumed.
The disruption caused to the social order by the intrusion of the fantastic provides the impetus for a radical investigation of the ideology of gender underpinning the dominant Enlightenment discourses on the nature of science, history and rationality.
Beatrice awakens after an eight-hundred-year sleep and travels throughout East Germany with the help of socialist trolley driver Laura Salman.
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