Contemporary Transnational German Literature and the Surreal

FAIN: FB-51658-05

Bettina Brandt
Penn State (Montclair, NJ 07043-1600)

In my book CONTEMPORARY TRANSNATIONAL GERMAN LITERATURE AND THE SURREAL I examine what service Surrealism renders to German writers like Rumanian-born Herta Müller, Turkish-born Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Japanese-born Yoko Tawada. I argue that Surrealism offers these contemporary writers a language, both in terms of narrative procedures and as a critical vocabulary. Surrealists concepts such as collage, montage, automatic writing, the idea of shock, fortuitous encounters, found objects, and collections are productive notions for these writers whose relationship to reality, to that what those who stay at home commonly experience as "the familiar" has been ruptured, for political, cultural or linguistic reasons, and often more than once.