Literary Interventions and Re-Imagined Communities in Contemporary Postmigrant Writing

Dissertation

• worked out by Laura Sturtz
• Cohort 1 (since 2022)

Literary Interventions and Re-Imagined Communities in Contemporary Postmigrant Writing

The dissertation project engages with substantial shifts in the representation and visibility of minoritized authors in the contemporary German cultural sphere and the increasing number of literary interventions that foreground the complexity and radical diversity of German identities and question the uniformity of identity itself. Literary texts such as Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Außer Sich (2017), Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst (2020), Shida Bazyar’s Drei Kameradinnen (2021) and Fatma Aydemir’s Dschinns (2022) re-conceive, re-define and re- write understandings of foreclosing notions of ’Germanness‘ by centering previously marginalized perspectives and challenging fixed frames of nationality, ethnicity, language, sexuality and family. Through an intersectional approach the project explores the critical endeavor of these novels to aesthetically subvert and intervene in contemporary discourses between the literary and the public sphere.