Christine Meyer
Université de Picardie Jules Verne, UFR Langues, Faculty Member
- Christine MEYER (1966) is an Associate Professor in German literature and cultural studies at Université de Picardie-... moreChristine MEYER (1966) is an Associate Professor in German literature and cultural studies at Université de Picardie-Jules Verne. Her research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, intertextual and intermedial practices, canonicity and canon critique, and the relationship between literature and memory from a transnational perspective.edit
Based on two short metafictional texts written by Rafik Schami in homage to Adelbert von Chamisso (1990) and Heinrich Heine (1997), respectively, the present article aims to show how the German writer of Syrian origin, by opening a... more
Based on two short metafictional texts written by Rafik Schami in homage to Adelbert von Chamisso (1990) and Heinrich Heine (1997), respectively, the present article aims to show how the German writer of Syrian origin, by opening a “dialogue” with illustrious predecessors who had a transnational trajectory themselves, claims a place for himself and his fellow non-Native peers in the German literary field. More broadly, the study sheds light on the multifaceted dimensions of counter-discourse at work in contemporary German-language literature deemed "intercultural" with regards to the national and European, or even Western, literary canon. It thus provides an insight into the forms and stakes of a writing back "à l'allemande" that is still little considered in German studies.
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Volume Introduction
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This volume investigates how German-language postmemory narratives are helping to renew national memory discourse. It examines works produced since 1989 that are located on the threshold between document and fiction. By searching for... more
This volume investigates how German-language postmemory narratives are helping to renew national memory discourse. It examines works produced since 1989 that are located on the threshold between document and fiction. By searching for (auto-)biographical traces, and carrying out archaeological excavation and detective investigation, these works are both a reflection and medium of the pluralization of remembering in the German-speaking world.
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Among the novelists who took a close interest in the social, psychological, anthropological, political and aesthetic issues raised by the rise of radio technology in the 1920s and 1930s, one of the most talented was a Swiss crime writer... more
Among the novelists who took a close interest in the social, psychological, anthropological, political and aesthetic issues raised by the rise of radio technology in the 1920s and 1930s, one of the most talented was a Swiss crime writer little known abroad, Friedrich Glauser (1896-1938). The article shows how the man who has been called the "Swiss Simenon" set out in his novels to combat mass culture on its own ground, denouncing its lies while at the same time competing directly with it, so as to develop an alternative model of "good" media use. The humanist credo that underpins his writing, tempering his clear-sighted criticism of the media with the hope of ethical progress for humanity, is a didactic strategy: Glauser, who has never had a "voice" himself since he was placed under guardianship at the age of 22, believes above all in the pedagogical virtue of utopia.
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The exiled Viennese Sepharad writers, Elias and Veza Canetti, were confronted with the problem of their relation with the host country, England, and with the land of their origins, Vienna. The situation of exile reinforced their belonging... more
The exiled Viennese Sepharad writers, Elias and Veza Canetti, were confronted with the problem of their relation with the host country, England, and with the land of their origins, Vienna. The situation of exile reinforced their belonging to Spanish culture and to the Mediterranean and more generally the “Oriental” world. The present article deals with their trajectory looking at three different elements in order to explain why Veza failed where her husband finally succeeded. Veza died in 1963 and didn’t manage to publish any of her works, and for that reason there are but few examples of the work of this socialist and feminist author to enable us to understand her. Her last known work, a spirited comedy in English style, shows her desire to integrate and her ability to intertwine lightness and earnestness in weaving the thematic threads of exile into an entertaining play.
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Située à la périphérie de l'Europe, la Turquie se trouve à l'écart du "système-monde" dans la géographie du roman selon Franco Moretti. Ce pays serait-il aujourd'hui capable de produire un nouveau modèle de roman comparable au roman russe... more
Située à la périphérie de l'Europe, la Turquie se trouve à l'écart du "système-monde" dans la géographie du roman selon Franco Moretti. Ce pays serait-il aujourd'hui capable de produire un nouveau modèle de roman comparable au roman russe d'idées ou au réalisme magique? Orhan Pamuk fait partie de ceux qui tentent d'accomplir ce "projet irréalisable", ou du moins d'en poser les bases. Istanbul, cité pluriséculaire pourvue d’une histoire aussi riche que complexe et mouvementée, ancienne capitale d’un empire multiethnique déchue au rang de mégalopole tiers-mondisée à croissance exponentielle, en même temps que point de départ d’une émigration massive vers l’Europe et les États-Unis, peut sembler prédestinée à devenir le berceau d’une nouvelle littérature multiculturelle et post-nationale, à l’exemple de Buenos Aires ou de Bombay. Quel espace de l’imaginaire pourrait produire une telle métropole, chantée jusqu’au début du XXe siècle par les visiteurs occidentaux épris d’Orient et dont l’image figure de manière obsédante au coeur de nombre de romans contemporains? L'article tente de répondre à cette question en examinant trois textes emblématiques de cette situation complexe dans la mesure où leurs auteurs y occupent des positions bien distinctes et ne sont liés entre eux ni par une solidarité nationale ni même par l’appartenance à une "communauté" culturelle, fût-telle diasporique.
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Authors of German migration literature create what Leslie A. Adelson has called “touching tales,” i.e. literary narratives that decenter the gaze on national culture by commingling developments and references previously not thought to... more
Authors of German migration literature create what Leslie A. Adelson has called “touching tales,” i.e. literary narratives that decenter the gaze on national culture by commingling developments and references previously not thought to belong together. Shaking up the frames of reference of literary criticism, these works not only show what immigrant populations have added to German culture by enriching it with foreign elements, but also contribute in an essential way to reconfiguring the national imagination by weaving a dialectical relationship between the old and the new, the self and the foreign, the local and the global. This transformation takes place at a pivotal time in German political and cultural history: the decade 1990-2000, the time of the so-called “Wendeliteratur” (literature of the “Turn”). The interest of non-native authors in the national literary heritage is particularly significant in this period, when the unification of Germany threatens to jeopardize the integration process of the minority populations that have settled on both sides of the Wall since the partition. The issue was all the more ideologically charged because the literary canon was the subject of fierce debate in the German public sphere. In order to illustrate the complexity of the dialogue that unfolded between marginalized writers and the majority society via the discussion of the canon, the article explores a text co-written by the Syrian-born writer Rafik Schami with his colleague and editor, Uwe-Michael Gutzschhahn. This metafictional novel dedicated to Goethe is both a postcolonial act of “writing back” and an act of reverence by which an author in search of legitimacy claims a literary filiation. Intended for a teenage audience, it also has the peculiarity of pursuing an openly didactic objective: to complement and counterpoint the teaching of literature in high school by integrating the point of view of populations of diverse origins. This pragmatic dimension makes it an object of choice for our demonstration, since with this book, Schami not only participates in the collective reflection about the canon but contributes in an effective way to its reworking.
Research Interests: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Intertextuality, Metafiction, Migrant and Diasporic Literature, Young Adult Literature, and 8 moreInterculturality, Contemporary German-Language Literature, Globalization and Transnationalism, Uchronia, Postcolonialism, reception of Goethe, Rafik Schami, and Uwe-Michael Gutzschhahn
This volume addresses the challenges that transnational writing in German poses to literary studies. To what extent have the contours of the research field of German-language literature shifted as a result of the intrusion of 'foreign'... more
This volume addresses the challenges that transnational writing in German poses to literary studies. To what extent have the contours of the research field of German-language literature shifted as a result of the intrusion of 'foreign' voices due to transnational migration flows and cultural globalization processes? To what extent has its focus shifted? The authors of this volume attempt to account for the ongoing internationalization of German-language literature, overcoming the problematic division into categories such as 'migration', 'intercultural', or 'transcultural literature'. The essays fit into the context of a collective reflection on translingual and transnational writing practices that aims to contribute to the construction of a decentered cultural and literary history. The horizon of the analyses is determined in particular by postcolonial and comparative research perspectives.
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Using E. S. Özdamar's second novel "The Bridge of the Golden Horn" as an example, this article works out what is achieved by the deterritorialization of the literary canon in texts by contemporary German minority authors: On the one hand,... more
Using E. S. Özdamar's second novel "The Bridge of the Golden Horn" as an example, this article works out what is achieved by the deterritorialization of the literary canon in texts by contemporary German minority authors: On the one hand, the universal validity of canonized texts is reaffirmed; on the other hand, the claim to superiority of the West derived from it by conservative advocates of the "Western canon" is fundamentally questioned. What is at stake is not the status of those texts as superior works of art, but the fetish character they have assumed for Western culture and its hegemonic self-image. This procedure amounts to taking the logic of national and ethnocultural assignment ad absurdum and creating a transnational space of meaning.
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This paper contributes to a better understanding of the process of literary affiliation at work in the writings of Emine Sevgi Özdamar: to the masters of the great European tradition on the one hand and to certain 20th century German... more
This paper contributes to a better understanding of the process of literary affiliation at work in the writings of Emine Sevgi Özdamar: to the masters of the great European tradition on the one hand and to certain 20th century German writers on the other. The example of her short story Karriere einer Putzfrau (A Cleaning Woman’s Career) allows us to throw light on the forms taken by this double positioning, both in the Western canon (represented by Shakespeare) and in modern German literature (in this case B. Brecht and H. Müller). An intertextual reading shows that these references are constitutive both of the text itself and of its ‘literariness’, in the sense that taking them into account is the only way to avoid a narrowly referential (and thus ethnicising) interpretation which would mask its discursive strategy and its ethical and philosophical underpinnings.
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Born into a Judeo-Spanish family with roots in the Ottoman Empire, German-speaking stateless writer Elias Canetti was one of the first, from the early 1940s onwards, to promote the paradigms of extraterritoriality, nomadism and hybridity.... more
Born into a Judeo-Spanish family with roots in the Ottoman Empire, German-speaking stateless writer Elias Canetti was one of the first, from the early 1940s onwards, to promote the paradigms of extraterritoriality, nomadism and hybridity. He was also one of the first to make his complex relationship with the German language and nation a central theme of his writing. Last but not least, he was driven throughout his life by the desire to promote a broader conception of world literature, including non-European bodies of work, particularly from the popular and oral traditions. Yet the highly ambivalent nature of his work makes it difficult to objectively assess its importance for posterity. It is to this reassessment of his place in literary and philosophical history that the present article intends to contribute, through a reading informed by the questions that structure contemporary debate, and more particularly those that underpin the work of immigrant writers of the "Chamisso generation".
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Dieser Band setzt sich mit den Herausforderungen auseinander, die grenzüberschreitendes Schreiben in deutscher Sprache an die Literaturwissenschaft stellt. Inwiefern haben sich die Umrisse des Forschungsfeldes deutschsprachige Literatur... more
Dieser Band setzt sich mit den Herausforderungen auseinander, die grenzüberschreitendes Schreiben in deutscher Sprache an die Literaturwissenschaft stellt. Inwiefern haben sich die Umrisse des Forschungsfeldes deutschsprachige Literatur durch das Eindringen ‚fremder‘ Stimmen infolge von transnationalen Migrationsströmen und kulturellen Globalisierungsprozessen verschoben? Inwiefern hat sich ihr Schwerpunkt verlagert? Die Autoren des Bandes versuchen, der fortschreitenden Internationalisierung der deutschsprachigen Literatur Rechnung zu tragen und dabei die problematische Einteilung in Sondersparten wie ‚Migrations‘-, ‚inter‘- oder ‚transkulturelle Literatur‘ zu überwinden. Die Abhandlungen fügen sich in den Kontext einer kollektiven Reflexion über translinguale und transnationale Schreibpraktiken ein, die zum Aufbau einer dezentrierten Kultur- und Literaturgeschichte beitragen möchte. Den Horizont der Analysen bestimmen insbesondere postkoloniale und komparatistische Forschungsperspektiven.
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This book highlights the role played by the reading of Stendhal, and in particular Vie de Henry Brulard, in the development of Elias Canetti's autobiographical writing. It shows what was at stake in this transposition, and how it took... more
This book highlights the role played by the reading of Stendhal, and in particular Vie de Henry Brulard, in the development of Elias Canetti's autobiographical writing. It shows what was at stake in this transposition, and how it took shape in Canetti's trilogy Die gerettete Zunge, Die Fackel im Ohr, and Das Augenspiel (1977-1985). Beyond the differences in period, style and orientation, the works of Stendhal and Canetti are based on a number of common postulates: a code of values (republican and humanist), the hierarchization of primitive experiences and a proudly asserted subjectivity. Faced with the doubts weighing on their enterprise in a context of increasingly acute crisis of subjectivity, both autobiographers resort to similar strategies: provocation, headlong rush, and the transfiguration of personal history into an assumed myth of the perfect personality.
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By unfolding the intertextual reworking of Cervantes’ Don Quixote in Elias Canetti’s novel Die Blendung, a parable of intellectual capitulation in the face of the rise of Nazism, this comparative study highlights the link between the two... more
By unfolding the intertextual reworking of Cervantes’ Don Quixote in Elias Canetti’s novel Die Blendung, a parable of intellectual capitulation in the face of the rise of Nazism, this comparative study highlights the link between the two canonical models that presided over its conception: not only Don Quixote but also Balzac's Comédie humaine. The figure of hyperbole helps us to grasp the meaning of Canetti’s transformation of Cervantes' text: by forcing to the point of absurdity the most grotesque and bitter features of this "raw old book", he provides a striking representation of the crisis facing European civilization at the end of the 1920s. Through the wandering of the hero, locked in an erudition cut off from reality, his fall into madness and his final suicide, the defeat of the intellectuals is denounced, their "betrayal" (Julien Benda) that paved the way for Nazism. The narratological analysis shows how intertextual reference, far from serving a backward-looking aesthetic ideal, is mobilized to represent a state of the world perceived as unrepresentable by the means of the psychological novel.
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What issues determine the language choice of writers in exile, in diasporic or postcolonial situations, in border regions or in other kinds of “contact zones” (M. L. Pratt)? What impact does this decision have on their approach to the... more
What issues determine the language choice of writers in exile, in diasporic or postcolonial situations, in border regions or in other kinds of “contact zones” (M. L. Pratt)? What impact does this decision have on their approach to the literary work? Tackled from a transnational, transhistorical and transdisciplinary angle, the question of language choice and its effect on literary forms and strategies sheds new light on a phenomenon that can no longer be considered marginal: writing at the crossroads of languages. By linking this question to that of resistance, this book aims to go beyond binary schemas such as dominant vs. dominated, center vs. periphery, identity vs. otherness, embracing in the same reflection productions usually considered as exophonic, diasporic, postcolonial, minority, regional or globalist. Without ignoring the specificities of each situation, it attempts to decentralize the way we look at different cultural areas, so as to renew our approach to the relationship between literature and globalization.
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To what extent do minority writers feel represented by the literary canon of a nation and its body of "great works"? To what extent do they adhere to, or contest, the supposedly universal values conveyed through those texts and how do... more
To what extent do minority writers feel represented by the literary canon of a nation and its body of "great works"? To what extent do they adhere to, or contest, the supposedly universal values conveyed through those texts and how do they situate their own works within the national tradition? Building on Edward W. Said’s contrapuntal readings and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s reflections on the voice of the subaltern, this monograph examines the ways in which Rafik Schami, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Feridun Zaimoglu have re-read, challenged, and adapted the German canon. Similar to other writers in postcolonial contexts, their work on the canon entails an inquiry into history and a negotiation of their relation to the texts and representations that define the "host" nation. Through close analyses of the works of these non-native German authors, the book investigates the intersection between politics, ethics, and aesthetics in their work, focusing on the appropriation and re-evaluation of cultural legacies in German-language literature. Opening up a rich critical dialogue with scholars of German Studies and Postcolonial Theory, the study provides a fresh perspective on German-language minority literature since the reunification.
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Talk held on 21.06.2024 at European University Viadrina
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Talk held on 29.11.2023 at Antwerp University
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Talk held on 12 June 2024, University of Vienna (Austria)
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In this interview with De Gruyter acquisitions editor Myrto Aspioti, Christine Meyer presents her book "Questioning the Canon: Counter-Discourse and the Minority Perspective in Contemporary German Literature" and talks about the ways in... more
In this interview with De Gruyter acquisitions editor Myrto Aspioti, Christine Meyer presents her book "Questioning the Canon: Counter-Discourse and the Minority Perspective in Contemporary German Literature" and talks about the ways in which Rafik Schami, Feridun Zaimoglu and Emine Sevgi Özdamar write ‘with’ and against the canon of German literature.
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Discussion panel with Iwan-Michelangelo D’Aprile (Universität Potsdam), Laurent Gautier (Université de Bourgogne), Christine Meyer (Université de Picardie Jules Verne), Elke Sturm-Trigonakis (Université Aristote de Thessalonique).... more
Discussion panel with Iwan-Michelangelo D’Aprile (Universität Potsdam), Laurent Gautier (Université de Bourgogne), Christine Meyer (Université de Picardie Jules Verne), Elke Sturm-Trigonakis (Université Aristote de Thessalonique). Moderated by Pierre-Yves Modicom (Université Bordeaux Montaigne).
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The paper aims to discuss a modern rewriting of the Dracula myth, a short story by the Syrian born German novelist Rafik Schami first published in 1984 under the title Vampire lieben Knoblauch (“Vampires Love Garlic”). Like Schami’s other... more
The paper aims to discuss a modern rewriting of the Dracula myth, a short story by the Syrian born German novelist Rafik Schami first published in 1984 under the title Vampire lieben Knoblauch (“Vampires Love Garlic”). Like Schami’s other early works, this satirical story is informed by both a Marxist approach to society and a polemical approach to Western culture. It is a piece of satirical metafiction where the “revision” of a Western classic serves as an entry point (a “pre-text” in the double sense of the term) to political allegory. What this text is not about, however, is – contrary to the ironically avowed claim of its second title (Die Wahrheit über Vampire und Knoblauch, “The Truth about Vampires and Garlic”) – providing new insights into the nature of mass killings, political violence, or moral evil in general. Instead, the palimpsest serves to scrutinize the ideological subtext of vampire fiction and thus to call into question the ways in which we think, speak, and write about mass criminals and charismatic authoritarian leaders. In so doing, as I will argue, it offers an indirect commentary on some sensitive issues of the time relating to the cultural memory of National-Socialism and the Holocaust.