Praktiken im Zwischenraum : Transitorisches Schreiben bei Katja Lange-Müller

• This thesis analyzes works by the contemporary German author Katja Lange-Müller, focusing on their representations of borders and in-between spaces. Thus, the thesis offers a new perspective on Lange-Müller’s work, which, in the few previous studies, has mainly been interpreted within the context of ‘subversive writing’ in the German Democratic Republic in the 1980s. In an effort to analyze transitory aspects of Lange-Müller’s writing, the study draws on theories of liminality and the peripheral in literature and merges them with Michel de Certeau’s notion of ‘everyday tactics’ in Practice of Everyday Life. The study develops the concept of ‘in-between practices’, which provides a basis for the analysis of Lange-Müller’s texts. ‘In-between practices’ are conceived as operations carried out by marginalized characters and narrators by which they intervene in border zones and interstices of systems in order to alienate codes, re-negotiate histories and assert themselves within a specific context. The analysis is structured into four parts, out of which three focus on a certain category of in-betweenness: state borders and attempts of border crossing; bodily borders and their transgression; and margins of written texts as potential spaces of rewriting histories. Focusing on the novel Böse Schafe (2007), the fourth analysis investigates the interplay of different border categories and practices of re-negotiation. In the interaction between the theoretical framework and a close reading of the primary texts, this thesis maps different activities of characters and narrators on borders and in the in-between. The study shows that these spaces bear critical, creative and political potential that Lange-Müller’s texts make use of not only on the level of histoire, but also within the discours. In conclusion, the study argues that Lange-Müller’s transitory poetics develops as the result of a correspondence between these two levels.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Studier av enskilda språk (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Languages (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

contemporary German literature

Katja Lange-Müller

transitory writing

liminality

hybridity

marginality

border crossing

metamorphosis

space in literature

literary self-reflexivity

Germanic languages

Germanistik

German

tyska

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

dok (ämneskategori)