Post-fascist fantasies : psychoanalysis, history, and the literature of East Germany / Julia Hell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hell, Julia.

Series:

Post-contemporary interventions.

Post-contemporary interventions

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

German literature--Germany (East)--History and criticism.

German literature.

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

Psychoanalysis and literature--Germany (East).

Psychoanalysis and literature.

Fascism and literature--Germany (East).

Fascism and literature.

Germany (East)--In literature.

Germany (East).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (381 p.)

Place of Publication:

Durham [N.C.] : Duke University Press, 1997.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Post-Fascist Fantasies examines the cultural function of the novels of Communist authors in East Germany from a psychoanalytic angle. Various critics have argued that these socialist realist fictions were monolithic attempts to translate Communist dogma into the realm of aesthetics. Julia Hell argues to the contrary that they were in fact complex fictions sharing the theme of antifascism, the founding discourse of the German Democratic Republic. Employing an approach informed by Slavoj Zizek's work on the Communist's sublime body and by British psychoanalytic feminism's concern with feminine subjectivity, Hell first examines the antifascist works by exiled authors and authors tied to the resistance movement.

She then strives to understand the role of Christa Wolf, the GDR's most prominent author, in the GDR's effort to reconstruct symbolic power after the Nazi period.

Contents:

Critical Orthodoxies: Toward a New Reading of East German Literature

I. In the Name of the Father: East Germany's Foundational Narratives. 1. Specters of Stalin, of Constructing Communist Fathers. 2. Stalinist Motherhood, or the Hollow Spaces of Emotion: Netty Reiling/Anna Seghers

II. Mapping the Oedipal Story onto Post-Fascist Socialism: New Families/New Bodies. 3. The Past in the Present: Sons, Daughters, and the Fantasy of Post-Fascist Bodies

III. Inscribing the Daughter in the Paternal Narrative. 4. Post-Fascist Body/Post-Fascist Voice: Christa Wolf's Moskauer Novelle and Der geteilte Himmel. 5. The Paternal Family Narrative as Autobiography and as Parable: Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster and Kassandra. History as Trauma.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (pages [331]-359) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780822319634

0822319632

9780822399780

0822399784

OCLC:

891395363