Models Of National History In Novels Of German Female Authors 1990 2000
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31548/philolog0(263).2017.0141%20-%20149Abstract
The article deals with the difficult correlation between memory and history. Over the last 20 years these concepts have become the most important issues for literary studies and, first of all, German studies. The reason is the contemporary German novel, which includes novels of female writers and represents two main national discourses of reunification and coming to terms with the past. The German И?literature of the turn’ (И?Wende-Literatur’) contains artistic versions of national past focusing on national socialism, socialism and reunification. The construction of alternative versions of national past in the female novelistic prose is particularly representative. The novels of H. Müller, M. Maron and J. Erpenbeck illustrate the traumatic authentic experience of the women from Eastern Bloc (Romania and GDR) and depict not only difficulties of the female being and self-understanding, but also official history of Germany as alternative models of the past according to the categories of time and gender in the correlation memory / history.
The purpose of the article is to analyze and to characterize literary models of German past in the female narration.
Due to the results of narrative analysis of the texts under consideration and analysis based on the methods of cultural and gender studies two subversive models of national history were defined. They are not isolated, but reflect each other. The female narration represents the family model as well as the model of narrative female body. The Romanian and German past takes a form of family chronic, violence against woman, age difficulties, illness and even sexual contact. The gendering of these flashbacks to the German past allows to specify such peculiar features of mentioned narrative models as emancipation, privacy, feminity, subversiveness and catastrophic determinacy. Consequently the female prose develops the multiple versions of the past in the double-voice discourse, where the female destiny reflects and deconstructs the official point of view on the national past.
The article draws upon a small part of contemporary German literature giving and tracing new perspectives of narrative turn, cultural and gender studies discovering a text as a construct.
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