Übergänge zur Schriftlichkeit. Zu wechselnden Profilen dialektaler Literalität am Beispiel des Niederdeutschen

Different types of Low German literacy create varieties in addition to spoken Low German. Their function differs according to the change of language use. By setting the focus on dialectal literature it becomes clear, which concepts of Low German literature became influential since the 19th century. In the recent situation, new perspectives for Low German and its literature can be found in the field of planned language acquisition for example at school. Therefore written forms of Low German become much more important than usually thought of by looking at the ideas of language policy and the development at schools in Northern Germany

German-language culture and the Slav stranger within

The aim of this article is to delineate the symbolic position of the Slavonic, and in particular the Czech, in German-language Austrian culture of the period 1890–1940. My approach will be informed by psychoanalysis. A subsidiary aim is to try to demonstrate uses of psychoanalysis in the study of central European culture. What is at issue here is an historical set of social power relations that find their expression in culture, that is to say, in art and literature, and that can be interpreted by psychoanalysis. All too often psychoanalysis avoids the social and the political outside the framework of the individual and her or his predictable traumas emanating from domestic life.1 This article, however, constitutes an exercise in inter- and intra-cultural psychoanalysis: intra-cultural as an investigation of psychoanalytic dynamics within German-language culture; inter-cultural as an examination of the relationship between German-language and Slav cultures in psychoanalytic terms

The canonization of German-language digital literature

In his paper, "The Canonization of German-language Digital Literature," Florian Hartling discusses "Net Literature," a relatively young phenomenon, that has its roots in experimental visual and concrete poetry and hypertext. With the use of new media technology, this new genre of literature has acquired much interest and is now considered to be one of the most important influences in contemporary art. Not only does Net Literature connect sound, video, and animation with interactivity and allows new forms of artistic expression, it also impacts significantly on the traditional functions of the literary system. Hartling suggests that, in relation to Net Literature, the notion of the "death of the author" gives birth to the "writing reader." Hartling presents the results of his study where he applies the concept of "canon" to German-language Net Literature and where he attempts to find out whether, in this new form of literature, a "canon" has already been formed. Based on Karl Erik Rosengren's framework of "mention technique," a sample of Germanlanguage reviews of Net Literature was analyzed. The study intends to test the applicability of Rosengren's method to the analysis of Net Literature, that is, whether it is valid to use a method that was originally developed for the empirical study of the traditional literary canon for the study of an emergent Net Literature

Elicited imitation as a window into developmental stages

In the second language acquisition literature, data of naturally occurring language use are considered the most ideal data to make statements about second-language (L2) development. This study examines to what extent experimentally elicited data can provide an equally valid basis for determining L2 development, by testing predictions derived from Processability Theory regarding the L2 acquisition of the German case system. Using naturally occurring language data, previous research on L2 German case acquisition has uncovered three developmental stages. The present cross-sectional study investigates whether the same stages occur in data obtained from an experimental task (i.e., a computer oral elicited imitation task (OEIT). Thirty-six university L2 learners of German participated in the study. The results show that the elicited data prove comparable to the naturally occurring data. As such, this study corroborates a previous validation study on developmental stages in L2 English, which demonstrated the comparability of naturally occurring and experimentally elicited data. In addition, concerning methodological advancement of the OEIT design, the present study proposes to include a direct measure of comprehension

The wolf in sheep's clothing: Camouflaged borrowing in Modern German

This article addresses a phenomenon of language contact that has not received much attention in mainstream contact linguistics, namely borrowing via a mechanism Zuckermann (2003) calls MULTISOURCED NEOLOGISATION. Multisourced neologisation is a subtype of Zuckermann's larger class of CAMOUFLAGED BORROWING, and constitutes a special form of calquing in which the calque is phonetically similar to the source language material: It has much in common with folk etymology and is sometimes identified with it, but there are good theoretical reasons to keep the two phenomena apart. Though German is well known for its calquing ability, the application of this special type of calquing has gone virtually unnoticed in the literature as well as in the ongoing public debate over the excessive influx of loanwords. This paper shows that multisourced neologisation is not uncommon in the integration of elements borrowed from English into German, and argues that factors favouring its use include lexical and structural congruities between both languages as well as the relatively high transparency of English to the average speaker of German. Thus, though German does not belong to the protypical language groups using multisourced neologisation that are described by Zuckermann (2003), special circumstances prompt the application of this and other methods of camouflaged borrowing

Making the Invisible Heard: German-Kurdish Cultural Organizations and Transnational Networks

The increasing corpus of theoretical literature on transnationalism remains to be applied to many of the transnational migrant communities which have developed since the advent of modern globalization. This literary essay seeks to provide a perspective on the German-Kurdish community in Berlin, and how they fit into the larger European and Kurdish contexts. It illustrates the convergence of opportunities and disadvantages that German-Kurds face in Berlin, while also investigating what it means to be a Berliner-Kurd. The literary essay accordingly explores the role of language, cultural organizations, and regional networks. In doing so, it is hoped that topics about German-Kurds and transnationalism can be highlighted for further study

Unraveling Paradise: Colonialism and Disguise in German Language Literature

For centuries, the Pacific Islands have been disguised by Europeans through the trope of “island paradise. Despite Europe’s role in bringing colonization and racial oppression to Oceania, the dominant narrative has been that Pacific Islanders lead simple lives, untouched from the complicated aspects of the “modern world.” This narrative has enabled White outsiders to fantasize about the Pacific Islands as a place for personal denial of Western social conventions, simultaneously allowing White European men to fetishize and possess Pacific Island culture and identity. My honors project will closely examine three fictional German language texts- Haimotochare (1819), Der Papalagi (1920), and Imperium (2012)- centered around the exploration German colonial involvement in Pacific Islands. My analysis of these texts will allow for the understanding of how the false narrative of “island paradise” came to be, how it has been embraced and weaponized, and what it means for both German and Pacific Islander post-colonial identity

The Case of the Missing Literary Tradition: Reassessing Four Assumptions of Crime and Detective Novels in the German-Speaking World (1900-1933)

This article challenges four persistent assumptions in German-language postwar literary histories on crime and detective fiction that have led scholars to conclude that no literary tradition existed between 1900 and 1933 in the German-speaking world. These assumptions were that little German-language crime and detective fiction existed, that authors should still be well known today, that only works of high literature should constitute a tradition, and that crime and detective fiction should conform to Golden Age generic rules. By problematizing these assumptions, I provide an alternative perspective on the literature that existed and suggest approaches to understanding this invisible tradition

Letting the System Completely Absorb Me Would Be So Much Easier

SchwarzRund is a Black Dominican queer femme feminist, active in intersectional education, Black German publishing and spoken word, empowerment around Fatness, Blackness, Queerness, and allyship, and critical media research. In this interview, SchwarzRund speaks about the German publishing world, the role of Black queer presses, the importance of translation and multilingualism in Black German literature, and her experiences in academia at a predominantly white institution, the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. These observations are often threaded through the lens of her 2016 novel Biskaya, its three main characters Tue, Matthew, and Dwayne, and the various responses to the novel in Germany. SchwarzRund’s novel Biskaya: An Afropolitan Novel debuted to critical acclaim with zaglossus verlag in 2016. As the novel revolves around various forms of artistic production—music, visual art, poetry, etc.—SchwarzRund’s reflections on the novel are also always reflections on the German arts and publishing world in some important way. The interview took place in September 2019, and there was so much laughter throughout that we had to edit most of it out to save space. The German-language original of this interview appears in William Collins Donahue & Martin Kagel’s essay collection, Die große Mischkalkulation. Institutions, Social Import, and Market Forces in the German Literary Field. Fink, 2020