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Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject Literature - Comparative Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Groningen, language: English, abstract: In this essay, I argue that Terézia Mora with her novel "Alle Tage" ("Day In Day Out", 2004) breaks with all German literary categorisations and is able to catch the ambiguity and disorientation of the 21st century from multiple viewpoints, in the setting of migrant experience. "Alle Tage" is a piece of transcultural literature, not only in the broad sense of being "concerned with borders and borderlands between cultures", but more specifically because it is able to capture "the identities emerging from these locations" (Gerstenberger 2004: 212). It will be the aim of this essay to show how Alle Tage is moving away from the notion of a “stable” German identity towards complex identities in the age of globalisation. In this way the migrant becomes a metaphor of the century itself, and one-sided "we" and "them" arguments become redundant. "Alle Tage" has the ability to hold a mirror up to us.
In a scruffy park of a West European metropolis, a man in an ill-fitting trench coat is found hanging by the feet, half-dead. This is Abel Nema, the enigmatic yet fascinating protagonist of Terézia Mora’s internationally acclaimed novel, a linguistic phenomenon who can speak ten languages flawlessly but whose grip on reality is slowly slipping away. Since his self-imposed exile from his Balkan homeland ten years earlier, he has been making a life among fellow refugees: a group of bohemian jazz musicians, an eccentric student of ancient history, and a gang of young Gypsies. His acquaintances among the locals include a neighbor who claims to have visited heaven (and introduces Abel to hallu...
"In ihren Romanen und Erzählungen widmet sich Terézia Mora Außenseitern und Heimatlosen, prekären Existenzen und Menschen auf der Suche (...). Dies geschieht suggestiv und kraftvoll, bildintensiv und spannungsgeladen – mit ironischen Akzenten, irisierenden Anspielungen und analytischer Schärfe." So lautet die Begründung der Deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung für die Verleihung des Georg-Büchner-Preises 2018 an Terézia Mora. Das Heft umfasst neben Analysen der prägnanten Themen, Motive und Erzählformen ihrer Romane und Erzählungen sowie ihrer Poetik und Werkpolitik ein langes Gespräch mit ihrem Lektor Klaus Siblewski sowie eine Bibliografie der Werke Terézia Moras und der Arbeiten über ihr Werk.
Scholarship on Eastern Europe after 1989 often focuses narrowly on the socialist past as authoritarian, dictatorial, or totalitarian. This collection, by contrast, illuminates an additional dimension of post-socialist memory: it traces the survival of hopes and dreams born under socialism and the legacy of the unrealized alternative futures embedded within the socialist past. Looking at contemporary German-language literature, film, theater, and art, the volume analyzes reflections on everyday socialist realities as well as narratives of opposition and dissent. The texts discussed here not only revisit the past, but also challenge the present and help us imagine alternative futures. Rather than framing the unrealized futures envisioned in the pre-1989 era as failures, this collection probes post-socialist memory for its future-oriented potential to rethink issues of community, equity and equality, and late-stage capitalism. Foregrounding the complexities of Eastern European legacies also helps us reimagine the relationship between East and West both in Germany and in Europe as a whole.
Unique cross-cultural and multimedial approach to class identity and precarity in literature, theatre, and film Contemporary culture not merely reflects ongoing societal transformations, it shapes our understanding of rapidly evolving class realities. Literature, theatre, and film urge us to put the question of class back on the agenda, and reconceptualize it through the lens of precarity and intersectionality. Relying on examples from British, French, Spanish, German, American, Swedish and Taiwanese culture, the contributors to this book document a variety of aesthetic strategies in an interdisciplinary dialogue with sociology and political theory. Doing so, this volume demonstrates the myriad ways in which culture opens up new pathways to imagine and re-imagine class as an economic relation, an identity category, and a subjective experience. Situated firmly within current debates about the impact of social mobility, precarious work, intersectional structures of exploitation, and interspecies vulnerability, this volume offers a wide-ranging panorama of contemporary class imaginaries.
Contributions exploring the representation and reality of LGBTQ+ individuals and issues in historical and contemporary German-speaking culture. The German-speaking lands have a long history of engagement, ranging from celebratory to horrific, with non-normative genders and sexualities, including through cultural output, language, and politics. Queering German Culture, volume 10 of the Edinburgh German Yearbook, foregrounds this via new analyses of a variety of LGBTQ+ cultural artifacts - archives both physical and digital, literature in the form of novels and periodicals, and film both narrative and documentary - to consider a spectrum of gender and sexual identities. Individual chapters employ a range of lenses, including psychoanalysis, feminism, and postcolonial and queer theory, to analyze work by ThomasMann, Thomas Brussig, Jenny Erpenbeck, Terézia Mora, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Fatih Akin, among others. Contributors: Nicholas Courtman, Leanne Dawson, Kyle Frackman, Sarra Kassem, Lauren Pilcher, John L. Plews, Gary Schmidt, Cyd Sturgess. Leanne Dawson is Lecturer in German and Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh.
The first book to offer a cutting-edge discussion of contemporary travel writing in German, Anxious Journeys looks both at classical tropes of travel writing and its connection to current debates. The rich contemporary literature of travel has been the focus of numerous recent publications in English that seek to understand how travel narratives, with their distinctive representations of identities, places, and cultures, respond to today's globalized, high-speed world characterized by the dual mass movements of tourism and migration. Yet a corresponding cutting-edge discussion of twenty-first-century travel writing in German has until now been missing. The fourteen essays in Anxious Journeys...
This book examines how German-language authors have intervened in contemporary debates on the obligation to extend hospitality to asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants; the terrorist threat post-9/11; globalisation and neo-liberalism; the opportunities and anxieties of intensified mobility across borders; and whether transnationalism necessarily implies the end of the nation state and the dawn of a new cosmopolitanism. The book proceeds through a series of close readings of key texts of the last twenty years, with an emphasis on the most recent works. Authors include Terézia Mora, Richard Wagner, Olga Grjasnowa, Marlene Streeruwitz, Vladimir Vertlib, Navid Kermani, Felicitas Hoppe, Daniel Kehlmann, Ilija Trojanow, Christian Kracht, and Christa Wolf, representing the diversity of contemporary German-language writing. Through a careful process of juxtaposition and differentiation, the individual chapters demonstrate that writers of both minority and nonminority backgrounds address transnationalism in ways that certainly vary but which also often overlap in surprising ways.
Since the turn of the 21st century, countless literary endeavors by 'new Germans' have entered the spotlight of academic research. Yet 'minority writing', with its distinctive renegotiation of traditional concepts of cultural identity, is far from a recent phenomenon in German literature. A hundred years previously, the intense involvement of German-Jewish intellectuals in cultural and political discourses on Jewish identity put a clear stamp on German modernism. This book is the first to unfold literary parallels between these two riveting periods in German cultural history. Drawing on the philosophical oeuvre of Jean-Luc Nancy, a comparative reading of texts by, amongst others, Beer-Hofmann, Kermani, Özdamar, Roth, Schnitzler, and Zaimoglu examines a variety of literary approaches to the thorny issue of cultural identity, while developing an overarching perspective on the ‘politics of literature’.
Presence of the Body provides an interdisciplinary forum for the dialogue between theory and practice about the impact of the body on human awareness in the fields of art, writing, meditative practice, and performance. This dialogue benefits from the neuro-systematic integration of “embodied” knowledge in the cognitive sciences, but it also suggests creative and transformative dynamics of embodiment which, beyond conceptualisation, emerge in sophisticated acts of writing, performing and meditating. Exploring the presence and experience character of the body-awareness relationship, a double perspective beyond cognitive fixations is suggested: 1) a body-centred touch of the world which inspires life as a creative ‘writing’ process, and 2) in line with Buddhist thought, an empty space of ‘pure presence’ from which all conscious processes originate.