Global characters. Terézia Mora's "Alle Tage" as transcultural literature in the age of globalisation PDF Download

Author:
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3668737916
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 20

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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.

Author: German Studies Association. Conference
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1571139257
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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"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.

Author: Terezia Mora
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061976873
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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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 hallucinogens), the sordid characters who frequent the neighborhood sex bar, and a wonderfully zany family he joins when, desperate to extend his residency permit, he enters into a fictive marriage. Yet through it all he remains strangely hollow: for all his languages he has little humanity to put into words. Day In Day Out, Terézia Mora’s fierce and beautiful debut novel, is at once an evocation of the newly multicultural Europe and an exploration of a deeply disturbed individual. It is a prose labyrinth of rare poetic force that marks its author as a major new voice in contemporary fiction.

Author: Beibei Guan
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498595081
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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This book offers the first sustained argument against the philosophy of Walter Benjamin and his readings of Charles Baudelaire. More broadly, it is also a critique of politicized aesthetics and cultural Marxism, of which Benjamin is a pioneering and emblematic figure. Cristaudo and Beibei argue that Baudelaire was not mistaken in refusing to subject aesthetics to morality and politics. Baudelaire’s refusal was based on the recognition that existential matters, such as sickness, evil, death, sexual longing, melancholy, and beauty itself—all themes at the center of his poetry—are by nature intrinsically supra-political. By contrast, Benjamin’s faith in political redemption, while breaking with the enlightenment’s faith in progress, nevertheless conforms to another core element of faith of the enlightenment, via faith in the ability of morals and politics to liberate humanity. The authors make the case that Benjamin’s understanding of politics is severely deficient because it is not sufficiently versed in an understanding of economics or the nature of class interests, and that Marx’s own theory of economics is fundamentally deficient and creates an insurmountable problem for those deferring to a future industrial society free from capitalism.

Author: L. Adelson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403981868
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Challenging the commonplace that suspends migrants between two worlds', this study turns a refreshingly curious eye to complex cultural relations and literary novelties wrought by Turkish migration to Germany. At interpretive and historic crossroads involving dialogue and storytelling, genocide and taboo, and capital and labour in the 1990s. This book illuminates far-reaching imaginative effects that literatures of migration can engender. In critical conversation with Arjun Appadurai, Seyla Benhabib, Homi Bhabha, Rey Chow, Andreas Huyssen, Dominick LaCapra, Doris Sommer, and many others, Adelson probes history and aesthetics as surprisingly twinned indices of national and global transformation at the millennial turn.

Author: Lyn Marven
Publisher: Camden House (NY)
ISBN: 9781571134219
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Presents fifteen new German-language novelists and a close reading of an exemplary work of each for academics and the general reader alike.

Author: Hugh J. Silverman
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780873959797
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Hermeneutics and Deconstruction provides an assessment of two dominant modes of thinking and writing in continental philosophy today. It addresses central issues in the theory of interpretation and in the strategies of textual reading. Placed in the context of contemporary philosophical practice, this volume raises the question of the "end" of philosophy and offers different ways of understanding how the question of "closure" in philosophy can itself open up a whole range of philosophical activities. Special attention is given to the practice of interpretation in the areas of science, perception, and literature, and to the dimensions of hermeneutic understanding with respect to being, life, and the world. An investigation of how history is interpreted and read as a text provides access to one of the significant differences between hermeneutic understanding and deconstructionist practice. A section is devoted to the controversy concerning the value and the achievement of deconstruction. The writings of Heidegger and Derrida are juxtaposed and examined. And the volume concludes with several indications of new directions in continental philosophy and various versions of what a post-Derridean reading might entail.

Author: Robert Menasse
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631495720
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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“A dark comedy of manners packed with urgency” (H. W. Vail, Vanity Fair), The Capital is an instant classic of world literature. A highly inventive novel of ideas written in the rich European tradition, The Capital transports readers to the cobblestoned streets of twenty-first-century Brussels. Chosen as the European Union’s symbolic capital in 1958, this elusive setting has never been examined so intricately in literature. Translated with "zest, pace and wit" (Spectator) by Jamie Bulloch, Robert Menasse's The Capital plays out the effects of a fiercely nationalistic “union.” Recalling the Balzacian conceit of assembling a vast parade of characters whose lives conspire to form a driving central plot, Menasse adapts this technique with modern sensibility to reveal the hastily assembled capital in all of its eccentricities. We meet, among others, Fenia Xenopoulou, a Greek Cypriot recently “promoted” to the Directorate-General for Culture. When tasked with revamping the boring image of the European Commission with the Big Jubilee Project, she endorses her Austrian assistant Martin Sussman’s idea to proclaim Auschwitz as its birthplace—of course, to the horror of the other nation states. Meanwhile, Inspector Émile Brunfaut attempts to solve a gritty murder being suppressed at the highest level; Matek, a Polish hitman who regrets having never become a priest, scrambles after taking out the wrong man; and outraged pig farmers protest trade restrictions as a brave escapee squeals through the streets. These narratives and more are masterfully woven, revealing the absurdities—and real dangers—of a fracturing Europe. A tour de force from one of Austria’s most esteemed novelists, The Capital is a mordantly funny and piercingly urgent saga of the European Union, and an aerial feat of sublime world literature.

Author: Richard Kearney
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719042621
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
States of Mind is a series of dialogues conducted by Richard Kearney with twenty-two of the world's leading political, philosophical and literary thinkers. Each has helped to shape the most pressing debates of the century: national and international identity, ethics, art, language, psychology and religion.

Author: Danilo Zolo
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271008929
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
This book is a highly original and provocative contribution to democratic theory. Zolo argues that the increasing complexity of modern societies represents a fundamental challenge to the basic assumptions of the Western democratic tradition and calls for a reformulation of some of the key questions of political theory. Zolo maintains that, as modern societies become more complex and more involved in the "information revolution," they are subjected to new and unprecedented forms of stress--as manifested, for instance, in the growing autonomy and power of political parties, and in new kinds of political communication which create the fiction of consensus. These stresses have become so serious that they threaten to undermine some of the values traditionally associated with democracy, such as the rationality and autonomy of the individual, and the visibility and accountability of power. In conclusion, Zolo develops a set of proposals which seek to renew democratic values and to contribute to a fundamental reform of Western political systems.