Orientalism Reconsidered: Turkey in Barbara Frischmuth\u27s Das Verschwinden des Schattens in der Sonne and Hanne Mede-Flock\u27s Im Schatten der Mondsichel

Recent German criticism has demonstrated that the relationships of Austria and Germany with the Orient have been more complex than Edward Said\u27s Orientalism makes it appear. Furthermore, Said only touches upon gender issues. Studies like Rana Kabbani\u27s Europe\u27s Myths of Orient: Devise and Rule explore the convergence of race, class, and gender in the conceptualization of the Orient. Kabbani claims that in Elias Canetti\u27s Die Stimmen von Marrakesch the narrator\u27s identification with the colonizer\u27s position enters into his representation of self as much as does his gender. My essay demonstrates how the Austrian writer Barbara Frischmuth and the German writer Hanne Mede-Flock represent their female protagonists\u27 interaction with the Orient as more complex and less colonizing than that of Canetti\u27s narrator. While Frischmuth rewrites the Bildungsroman to subvert Eurocentric assumptions underlying travel literature, Mede-Flock goes one step further by taking the focus away from the individual protagonist and intellectual life in the city, and by representing the encounter with Turkey as political. However, Turkey remains a Eurocentric construct in the two novels, and their authors, by attempting to undermine some cultural stereotypes, unwittingly reinforce others

Orientalism Reconsidered: Turkey in Barbara Frischmuth's Das Verschwinden des Schattens in der Sonne and Hanne Mede-Flock's Im Schatten der Mondsichel

Recent German criticism has demonstrated that the relationships of Austria and Germany with the "Orient" have been more complex than Edward Said's Orientalism makes it appear. Furthermore, Said only touches upon gender issues. Studies like Rana Kabbani's Europe's Myths of Orient: Devise and Rule explore the convergence of race, class, and gender in the conceptualization of the "Orient." Kabbani claims that in Elias Canetti's Die Stimmen von Marrakesch the narrator's identification with the colonizer's position enters into his representation of self as much as does his gender. My essay demonstrates how the Austrian writer Barbara Frischmuth and the German writer Hanne Mede-Flock represent their female protagonists' interaction with the "Orient" as more complex and less "colonizing" than that of Canetti's narrator. While Frischmuth rewrites the Bildungsroman to subvert Eurocentric assumptions underlying travel literature, Mede-Flock goes one step further by taking the focus away from the individual protagonist and intellectual life in the city, and by representing the encounter with Turkey as political. However, Turkey remains a Eurocentric construct in the two novels, and their authors, by attempting to undermine some cultural stereotypes, unwittingly reinforce others

Counter-discursive strategies in first-world migrant writing

This thesis offers an analytical discussion of contemporary fictional and autobiographical narratives by migrants who write in a language other than their mother tongue and/or grew up in a bilingual environment. While not all literature by ethnic minority writers is necessarily concerned with the experience of growing up in or living between cultures, the present study deals with those writers whose texts self-reflexively and counter-discursively seek to define and express individual identity at the interface of two or more cultures. The writers discussed not only move spatially between places but also shift emotionally and intellectually between different languages and cultures as well as literary texts from these cultures. The focus is on language and the literary text itself as it becomes the site for an interaction of cultural codes. The methodology adopted draws eclectically on theories which explore the space between" from anthropological, linguistic, post-colonial and feminist perspectives. The thesis examines different textual paradigms of countering dominant discourses as found in ten representative texts from Australia, Canada, Germany and the United States which have been chosen to cover a range of cultural experience. The texts discussed are: Angelika Fremd's Heartland and Josef Vondra's Paul Zwillinq; Caterina Edwards' The Lion's Mouth, Henry Kreisel's The Betrayal and Rachna Mara's Of Customs and Excise; Franco Biondi's Abschied der zerschellten Jahre: Novelle and Akif Pirincci's Tranen sind immer das Ende: Roman; Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street, Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language and Richard Rodriguez' Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. It is shown that self-reflexive negotiation of Self and Other in the text takes different forms depending on the writer's ethnic and racial background, his/her gender and the adopted country's social and political attitudes toward the newcomer. Re-writing, however, which is understood as an intentional, political dialogue with specific texts, is a recurrent counter-discursive strategy in the texts discussed. Finally, the thesis argues that the re-writing of traditional literary genres, such as Novelle, short story cycle, autobiography, Bildungs roman and quest novel, rather than of a particular text, as in other post-colonial contexts, is the most prevalent form of "writing back" in migrant literature. Texts written by migrants not only creatively revise literary conventions, challenge the concept of “national literature" and undermine canonically established categories, but also defeat attempts to approach a text with a single "appropriate" theory to reveal the strategies and the effects of cultural hybridity.Arts, Faculty ofEnglish, Department ofGraduat

Role reversal and passing in postwar German and Austrian Jewish literature.

This dissertation examines role reversal and passing in postwar Austrian and German Jewish literature. Role reversal is a strategy in which individuals or characters in a literary text transform their identities by assuming attributes commonly associated with their opposites. This transformation could involve a perpetrator posing as a victim or the victim turning into a perpetrator. Passing refers to the way in which individuals or characters hide their identity in order to cross ethnic or social boundaries. For example, an individual or a character might feel compelled to conceal his or her Jewishness or non-Jewishness.This study examines a wide range of narratives by Austrian and German Jewish writers. The first chapter analyses role reversal and passing in the texts of Edgar Hilsenrath and Jurek Becker, two first generation German Jewish authors whose writing establishes certain patterns that second generation writers have adopted in their prose. The subsequent three chapters explore how second generation writers Maxim Biller, Irene Dische, Esther Dischereit, Anna Mitgutsch, Doron Rabinovici, and Robert Schindel adapt these patterns for their own purposes. I argue that role reversal and passing serve to counter anti-Semitic stereotypes, to highlight the identity problems of second generation Jews in Austria and in Germany, and to criticize the way in which non-Jewish Germans and Austrians have dealt with the Holocaust. I also argue that gender and nationality influence the way in which these authors use role reversal and passing.In the final chapter, I compare and contrast two real life cases of role reversal as documented in the memoir of Binjamin Wilkomirski, a non-Jewish Swiss posing as a Holocaust victim, and the wartime chronicle of Solomon Perel, a German Jew who disguised himself as a Hitler Youth to survive the war.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Queen's University (Canada), 2002.School code: 0283