Revolutionary Subjects explores the literary and cultural significance of Cold War solidarities a... more Revolutionary Subjects explores the literary and cultural significance of Cold War solidarities and offers insight into a substantial and under-analyzed body of German literature concerned with Latin American thought and action. It shows how literary interest in Latin America was vital for understanding oppositional agency and engaged literature in East and West Germany, where authors developed aesthetic solidarities that anticipated conceptual reorganizations of the world connoted by the transnational or the global. Through a combination of close readings, contextual analysis, and careful theoretical work, Revolutionary Subjects traces the historicity and contingency of aesthetic practices, as well as the geocultural grounds against which they unfolded, in case studies of Volker Braun, F.C. Delius, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Heiner Müller. The book’s cultural and comparative approach offers an antidote to imprecise engagements with the transnational, historicizing critical impulses that accompany the production of disciplinary boundaries. It paves the way for more reflexive debate on the content and method of German Studies as part of a broader landscape of world literature, comparative literature and Latin American Studies.
Letters to Europe (2011) is a collectively authored, transnational literary engagement with Europ... more Letters to Europe (2011) is a collectively authored, transnational literary engagement with Europe as an idea, a place, and a set of socio-political relationships. A print publication and performance, the ambivalent generic status of the Brussels-based project raises productive questions about how collective translation, transnational authorship, and multimedial performance strategies combine to advance new modes of aesthetic and political representation for subjects in transit in twenty-first century Europe. I argue for attention to multilingual and multimedial translations as sites of creative self-documentation on the part of mobile subjects as a critical counterpoint to state-sanctioned forms of documentality (Favorini). To that end, I show how collage as an aesthetic and editorial technique is used to assemble a visual and performative unity of multilingual texts; consider its implications for contemporary debates on language, culture, mobility and belonging in Europe and the EU; and explore the confluence of translation, document, and migration in innovative European literatures today.
Tales That Touch Migration, Translation, and Temporality in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century German Literature and Culture Edited by: Bettina Brandt and Yasemin Yildiz Volume 33 in the series Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies, 2022
Enzensberger’s sustained engagement with Latin American thinkers
and literary forms was central t... more Enzensberger’s sustained engagement with Latin American thinkers and literary forms was central to his attempts to shift the parameters of West German debates on literature and politics in the 1960s. Attention to Latin American exchanges and influences challenges simplistic criticisms of his Eurocentrism and demonstrates how the novel cultural constellations that underlie Enzensberger’s genre innovation engender productive inroads into transatlantic comparative projects.
Revolutionary Subjects explores the literary and cultural significance of Cold War solidarities a... more Revolutionary Subjects explores the literary and cultural significance of Cold War solidarities and offers insight into a substantial and under-analyzed body of German literature concerned with Latin American thought and action. It shows how literary interest in Latin America was vital for understanding oppositional agency and engaged literature in East and West Germany, where authors developed aesthetic solidarities that anticipated conceptual reorganizations of the world connoted by the transnational or the global. Through a combination of close readings, contextual analysis, and careful theoretical work, Revolutionary Subjects traces the historicity and contingency of aesthetic practices, as well as the geocultural grounds against which they unfolded, in case studies of Volker Braun, F.C. Delius, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Heiner Müller. The book’s cultural and comparative approach offers an antidote to imprecise engagements with the transnational, historicizing critical impulses that accompany the production of disciplinary boundaries. It paves the way for more reflexive debate on the content and method of German Studies as part of a broader landscape of world literature, comparative literature and Latin American Studies.
Letters to Europe (2011) is a collectively authored, transnational literary engagement with Europ... more Letters to Europe (2011) is a collectively authored, transnational literary engagement with Europe as an idea, a place, and a set of socio-political relationships. A print publication and performance, the ambivalent generic status of the Brussels-based project raises productive questions about how collective translation, transnational authorship, and multimedial performance strategies combine to advance new modes of aesthetic and political representation for subjects in transit in twenty-first century Europe. I argue for attention to multilingual and multimedial translations as sites of creative self-documentation on the part of mobile subjects as a critical counterpoint to state-sanctioned forms of documentality (Favorini). To that end, I show how collage as an aesthetic and editorial technique is used to assemble a visual and performative unity of multilingual texts; consider its implications for contemporary debates on language, culture, mobility and belonging in Europe and the EU; and explore the confluence of translation, document, and migration in innovative European literatures today.
Tales That Touch Migration, Translation, and Temporality in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century German Literature and Culture Edited by: Bettina Brandt and Yasemin Yildiz Volume 33 in the series Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies, 2022
Enzensberger’s sustained engagement with Latin American thinkers
and literary forms was central t... more Enzensberger’s sustained engagement with Latin American thinkers and literary forms was central to his attempts to shift the parameters of West German debates on literature and politics in the 1960s. Attention to Latin American exchanges and influences challenges simplistic criticisms of his Eurocentrism and demonstrates how the novel cultural constellations that underlie Enzensberger’s genre innovation engender productive inroads into transatlantic comparative projects.
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and literary forms was central to his attempts to shift the parameters of West German debates on literature and politics in the 1960s. Attention to Latin American exchanges and influences challenges simplistic criticisms of his Eurocentrism and demonstrates how the novel cultural constellations that underlie Enzensberger’s genre innovation engender productive inroads into transatlantic comparative projects.
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and literary forms was central to his attempts to shift the parameters of West German debates on literature and politics in the 1960s. Attention to Latin American exchanges and influences challenges simplistic criticisms of his Eurocentrism and demonstrates how the novel cultural constellations that underlie Enzensberger’s genre innovation engender productive inroads into transatlantic comparative projects.