Editions Rodopi BV is pleased to announce following new publication in
German Studies:
Mapping the Contours of Oppression:
Subjectivity, Truth and Fiction in Recent German Autobiographical
Treatments of Totalitarianism.
Owen Evans.
Amsterdam/New York, NY 2006. XII, 356 pp.
(Amsterdamer Publikationen zur Sprache und Literatur 156)
ISBN: 90-420-1719-8 €74,- / US $93.-
Online info: http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=AMPU+156
Despite all the assertions towards the end of the twentieth century that
the literary subject had expired along with the author, the wave of
autobiographies published in German after the Wende was a clear indication
that, on the contrary, life stories were very much alive. In this study,
Owen Evans examines the work of eight authors – Ludwig Harig, Uwe Saeger,
Ruth Klüger, Günter de Bruyn, Günter Kunert, Christoph Hein, Grete Weil
and Monika Maron – who all published personal texts after 1989 dealing
either with life in Nazi Germany or the GDR, and in some cases both. By
means of close textual analysis, Evans explores the impact these regimes
had on the individuals concerned and the contrasting ways in which the
authors handle the autobiographical project. They adopt varying textual
strategies to render the self on the page, with some employing overt
fiction, and yet in each case, the project was clearly motivated by the
need to treat psychological wounds inflicted on the self by
totalitarianism. In their mapping of the contours of oppression, the texts
at the heart of this study combine to offer a powerful defence of literary
autobiography, in Germany at least, as a valuable means of tackling the
legacy of totalitarianism.
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