Rewriting Germany from the margins : "other" German literature of the 1980s and 1990s / Petra Fachinger.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fachinger, Petra, 1958-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

German literature--20th century--History and criticism.

German literature.

German literature--Minority authors--History and criticism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 159 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Montreal ; Ithaca : McGill-Queen's University Press, c2001.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The "margins" in Petra Fachinger's work are occupied largely by second-generation migrant writers from Spain, Italy, and Turkey, German Jewish writers of diverse ethnic origins, and writers born in the GDR. She demonstrates that during the 1980s and 1990s writers from various cultural backgrounds engaged in oppositional discourse to construct their own version of Germany and write back to the German canon. While most studies of texts by minority writers in Germany favour content over form, Fachinger focuses on identifying counter-discursive strategies, and applies postcolonial theory concerned with textual resistance to the German situation. In doing so, this study effectively relates marginal writing in Germany to similar forms of writing in other national and cultural contexts. The oppositional impulse, whether manifested in counter-canonical discourse, postcolonial picaresque, hybridity, rewriting of genre, or grotesque realism, is prompted by the exclusionary politics of the dominant culture. The discursive strategies used by the authors discussed to rewrite Germany expose the assumptions that underlie German public discourse and destabilize notions of Germanness, Jewishness, and Turkishness. Fachinger's reading of texts by marginal writers in Germany, all of whom endeavour to resist marginalization while simultaneously experiencing or even celebrating the margin as a site of empowerment, was motivated by the absence of comparative studies of such writing. Rewriting Germany from the Margins demonstrates the necessity and usefulness of comparative approaches to minority discourses across national and cultural borders.

Contents:

Writing back to Keller and Goethe: Franco Biondi and Akif Pirincci

(Post)colonial picaresque: Kerstin Jentzsch and Thomas Brussig

Re-placing language: the poetry of Zehra Cirak and Jose Oliver

Rewriting home: the border writing of Barbara Honigmann and Renan Demirkan

Rewriting autobiography: Lea Fleischmann and Richard Chaim Schneider

Rewriting Turkey: Barbara Frischmuth and Hanne Mede-Flock

Writing back to liberal discourse: Feridun Zaimoglu's grotesque realism.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. [145]-155) and index.

ISBN:

1-282-85956-0

9786612859564

0-7735-6955-3

OCLC:

76898610