Call for Contributions:
Edinburgh German Yearbook 9 (2015)
Archive and Memory in German-Language Literature and Culture
Editor: Dora Osborne (University of Edinburgh)
In recent years, there has been a shift in the discourse of memory generally, and the focus of Germany’s memory culture specifically, to questions of the archive. An archive can refer to a physical place, the material found there, or the system that orders this; in its broadest sense, it might refer to something public (records housed in a municipal building), or something private (photographs in a family album). The material and documentary qualities of the archive confer on it an authenticating function attributed only cautiously to memory, but if memory and trauma studies have shown the unreliable nature of memory, theories of the archive question the status of material, documentary vestiges of the past equally. Nevertheless, the two – memory and the archive – are inextricably linked. For Aleida Assmann, archives are also a type of memory (Speichergedächtnis), but this is a latent resource and can only be made meaningful through more active modes of remembering. Yet, as Derrida notes, this means the archive is always implicated in the politics of memory. This complex relationship determines our engagement with the past and finds particular expression in literature and culture. It can be seen in the use (either physical or descriptive) of archive material in literary and artistic projects (e.g. W. G. Sebald, Monika Maron, Sigrid Sigurdsson, Simon Menner, Thomas Demand), and in projects which themselves comprise a kind of archive (e.g. Gerhard Roth, Walter Kempowski, Gerhard Richter, Bernd and Hilla Becher).
This volume aims to explore the changing relationship between memory and the archive in German-language literature and culture since 1900 and with a particular focus on work after 1945. Contributions of approximately 6,000 words are invited on but are not restricted to the following topics:
• Trauma, memory and archive (Holocaust memory, video testimony archive, Holocaust museums)
• Control of memory and the archive (access and availability, Stasi files/BStU, surveillance society)
• Photography and film (the role of family albums, atlases, questions of seriality and repetition, documentary, film as archive, digital and analogue)
• Performance (the role of theatre archives, performance from the archives, body as archive)
• Sites of collection - physical and virtual (archives, libraries, museums, databases)
• In/authenticity (fantasy archives/ archive fantasies, documentary role of archive material in literature and visual art)
Proposals (250-300 words) should be sent to Dora Osborne ([log in to unmask]) by 28 February 2014.
Contributors will be informed of the final selection by the end of March, and the deadline for submission of papers will be 31 December 2014. All contributions will be peer reviewed.
Previous issues of Edinburgh German Yearbook:
EGYB 7 (2013) Ethical Approaches in Contemporary German-Language Literature and Culture
Ed. by Frauke Matthes and Emily Jeremiah
EGYB 6 (2012) Sadness and Melancholy in German-Language Literature and Culture
Ed. by Mary Cosgrove and Anna Richards
EGYB 5 (2011) Brecht and the GDR: Politics, Culture, Posterity
Ed. by Laura Bradley and Karen Leeder
EGYB 4 (2010) Disability in German Literature, Film, and Theater
Ed. by Eleoma Joshua and Michael Schillmeier
EGYB 3 (2009) Contested Legacies: Constructions of Cultural Heritage in the GDR
Ed. by Matthew Philpotts and Sabine Rolle
EGYB 2 (2008) Masculinities in German Culture
Ed. by Sarah Colvin and Peter Davies
EGYB 1 (2007) Cultural Exchange in German Literature
Ed. by Eleoma Joshua and Robert Vilain
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