Contemporary German Fiction

Contemporary German Fiction
Author: Stuart Taberner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2007-06-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139464159

The profound political and social changes Germany has undergone since 1989 have been reflected in an extraordinarily rich range of contemporary writing. Contemporary German Fiction focuses on the debates that have shaped the politics and culture of the new Germany that has emerged from the second half of the 1990s onwards and offers the first comprehensive account of key developments in German literary fiction within their social and historical context. Each chapter begins with an overview of a central theme, such as East German writing, West German writing, writing on the Nazi past, writing by women and writing by ethnic minorities. The authors discussed include Günter Grass, Ingo Schulze, Judith Hermann, Christa Wolf, Christian Kracht and Zafer Senocak. These informative and accessible readings build up a clear picture of the central themes and stylistic concerns of the best writers working in Germany today.

Contemporary German Fiction

Contemporary German Fiction
Author: Stuart Taberner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2007-06-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521860789

These accessible and informative essays explore the central themes and contexts of the best writers working in Germany today.

The Cambridge Companion to the Modern German Novel

The Cambridge Companion to the Modern German Novel
Author: Graham Bartram
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2004-04-05
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780521483926

The Cambridge Companion to the Modern German Novel, first published in 2004, provides a broad ranging introduction to the major trends in the development of the German novel from the 1890s to the present. Written by an international team of experts, it encompasses both modernist and realist traditions, and also includes a look back to the roots of the modern novel in the Bildungsroman of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The structure is broadly chronological, but thematically-focused chapters examine topics such as gender anxiety, images of the city, war, and women's writing; within each chapter, key works are selected for close attention. Unique in its combination of breadth of coverage and detailed analysis of individual works, and featuring a chronology and guides to further reading, this Companion will be indispensable to students and teachers.

The Reader

The Reader
Author: Bernhard Schlink
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2001-05-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0375726977

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany. "A formally beautiful, disturbing and finally morally devastating novel." —Los Angeles Times When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover—then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.

Transnationalism in Contemporary German-language Literature

Transnationalism in Contemporary German-language Literature
Author: German Studies Association. Conference
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2015
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1571139257

"Transnationalism" has become a key term in debates in the social sciences and humanities, reflecting concern with today's unprecedented flows of commodities, fashions, ideas, and people across national borders. Forced and unforced mobility, intensified cross-border economic activity due to globalization, and the rise of trans- and supranational organizations are just some of the ways in which we now live both within, across, and beyond national borders. Literature has always been a means of border crossing and transgression-whether by tracing physical movement, reflecting processes of cultural transfer, traveling through space and time, or mapping imaginary realms. It is also becoming more and more a "moving medium" that creates a transnational space by circulating around the world, both reflecting on the reality of transnationalism and participating in it. This volume refines our understanding of transnationalism both as a contemporary reality and as a concept and an analytical tool. Engaging with the work of such writers as Christian Kracht, Ilija Trojanow, Julya Rabinowich, Charlotte Roche, Helene Hegemann, Antje R vic Strubel, Juli Zeh, Friedrich D rrenmatt, and Wolfgang Herrndorf, it builds on the excellent work that has been done in recent years on "minority" writers; German-language literature, globalization, and "world literature"; and gender and sexuality in relation to the "nation." Contributors: Hester Baer, Anke S. Biendarra, Claudia Breger, Katharina Gerstenberger, Elisabeth Herrmann, Christina Kraenzle, Maria Mayr, Tanja Nusser, Lars Richter, Carrie Smith-Prei, Faye Stewart, Stuart Taberner. Elisabeth Herrmann is Associate Professor of German at Stockholm University. Carrie Smith-Prei is Associate Professor of German at the University of Alberta. Stuart Taberner is Professor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture and Society at the University of Leeds and is a Research Associate in the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch; German and French at the University of the Free State, South Africa.

Contemporary Women's Writing in German

Contemporary Women's Writing in German
Author: Brigid Haines
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2004
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780198159674

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 Muller, and Emine Sevgi Ozdamar sets out to challenge dominant models of German identity. Focusing on the body and suffering, theyexplore 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.

Modern German Literature

Modern German Literature
Author: Michael Minden
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2011-03-28
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0745629202

Beginning with the emergence of German-language literature on the international stage in the mid-eighteenth century, the book plays down conventional labels and periodization of German literary history in favour of the explanatory force of international cultural impact. It explains, for instance, how specifically German and Austrian conditions shaped major contributions to European literary culture such as Romanticism and the 'language scepticism' of the early twentieth century. --

Ottoman Eurasia in Early Modern German Literature

Ottoman Eurasia in Early Modern German Literature
Author: Gerhild Scholz Williams
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2021-05-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0472128620

Even a casual perusal of seventeenth-century European print production makes clear that the Turk was on everyone’s mind. Europe’s confrontation of and interaction with the Ottoman Empire in the face of what appeared to be a relentless Ottoman expansion spurred news delivery and literary production in multiple genres, from novels and sermons to calendars and artistic representations. The trans-European conversation stimulated by these media, most importantly the regularly delivered news reports, not only kept the public informed but provided the basis for literary conversations among many seventeenth-century writers, three of whom form the center of this inquiry: Daniel Speer (1636-1707), Eberhard Werner Happel (1647-1690), and Erasmus Francisci (1626-1694). The expansion of the Ottoman Empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries offers the opportunity to view these writers' texts in the context of Europe and from a more narrowly defined Ottoman Eurasian perspective. Ottoman Eurasia in Early Modern German Literature: Cultural Translations (Francisci, Happel, Speer) explores the variety of cultural and commercial conversations between Europe and Ottoman Eurasia as they negotiated their competing economic and hegemonic interests. Brought about by travel, trade, diplomacy, and wars, these conversations were, by definition, “cross-cultural” and diverse. They eroded the antagonism of “us and them,” the notion of the European center and the Ottoman periphery that has historically shaped the view of European-Ottoman interactions.

Measuring the World

Measuring the World
Author: Daniel Kehlmann
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2009-03-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307496759

Measuring the World marks the debut of a glorious new talent on the international scene. Young Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann’s brilliant comic novel revolves around the meeting of two colossal geniuses of the Enlightenment. Late in the eighteenth century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. One of them, the aristocratic naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, negotiates jungles, voyages down the Orinoco River, tastes poisons, climbs the highest mountain known to man, counts head lice, and explores and measures every cave and hill he comes across. The other, the reclusive and barely socialized mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, can prove that space is curved without leaving his home. Terrifyingly famous and wildly eccentric, these two polar opposites finally meet in Berlin in 1828, and are immediately embroiled in the turmoil of the post-Napolean world.

Making German Jewish Literature Anew

Making German Jewish Literature Anew
Author: Katja Garloff
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2022-12-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0253063736

In Making German Jewish Literature Anew, Katja Garloff traces the emergence of a new Jewish literature in Germany and Austria from 1990 to the present. The rise of new generations of authors who identify as both German and Jewish, and who often sustain additional affiliations with places such as France, Russia, or Israel, affords a unique opportunity to analyze the foundational moments of diasporic literature. Making German Jewish Literature Anew is structured around a series of founding gestures: performing authorship, remaking memory, and claiming places. Garloff contends that these founding gestures are literary strategies that reestablish the very possibility of a German Jewish literature several decades after the Holocaust. Making German Jewish Literature Anew offers fresh interpretations of second-generation authors such as Maxim Biller, Doron Rabinovici, and Barbara Honigmann as well as of third-generation authors, many of whom come from Eastern European and/or mixed-religion backgrounds. These more recent writers include Benjamin Stein, Lena Gorelik, and Katja Petrowskaja. Throughout the book, Garloff asks what exactly marks a given text as Jewish—the author's identity, intended audience, thematic concerns, or stylistic choices—and reflects on existing definitions of Jewish literature.