Stuart Taberner Libros

These accessible and informative essays explore the central themes and contexts of the best writers working in Germany today.

The first major study of the contemporary German debate over "normalization" and its impact across the range of cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and historical discourses.

Literary fiction in Germany has long been a medium for contemplation of the 'nation' and questions of national identity. From the mid-1990s, in the wake of heated debates on the future direction of culture, politics and society in a more 'normal', united country, German literature has become increasingly diverse and seemingly disparate - at the one extreme, it represents the attempt to 'reinvent' German traditions, at the other, the unmistakable influence of Anglo-American forms and pop literature. A shared concern of almost all of recent German fiction, however, is the contemporary debate on globalisation, its nature, impact and consequences for 'local culture'. In its engagement with globalisation the literature of the Berlin Republic continues the long-established practice of reflection on what it is to be 'German'.This book investigates literary responses to the phenomenon of globalisation. The subject is approached from a wide range of thematic and theoretical perspectives in twelve chapters which, taken together, also provide an overview of German fiction from the mid-1990s to the present. The book serves both as an introduction to contemporary German literature for university students of German and as a resource for scholars interested in culture and society in the Berlin Republic.

This collection of fifteen essays by scholars from the UK, US, Germany, and Scandinavia explores the complexities of German identity. Unlike previous works that focus solely on national identity post-Hitler, this volume examines the diverse ethnic, sexual, political, geographical, and cultural identities in contemporary Germany, highlighting their often fragmented nature amid challenges like unification and globalization. The essays adopt an interdisciplinary approach, utilizing historical, sociological, and literary perspectives. They are organized into three sections: Berlin, Political Formations, and Difference, while also interconnecting to provide a nuanced understanding of identity in modern Germany. Key topics include the self-understanding of the Berlin Republic, the significance of Berlin as a public space, the architecture debate, the Walser-Bubis discourse, representations of German history, the influence of the German student movement, and the myth of Saxon identity. Additionally, the collection addresses women's roles in post-1989 Germany, the symbolism of trains, identity construction among Turks in Germany, and the current state of German literature. Contributors include notable scholars such as Frank Brunssen, Ulrike Zitzlsperger, and Stuart Taberner, among others, offering a comprehensive examination of identity in today's Germany.

An opening section on the 1950s - a decade of intense literary engagement with German victimhood before the focus shifted to German perpetration - provides context, drawing parallels but also noting differences between the immediate postwar period and today. The second section focuses on key texts written since the mid-1990s and examines shifts in perspectives on the Nazi past, on perpetration and victimhood, on "ordinary Germans," and on the balance between historical empathy and condemnation."--BOOK JACKET.

The book offers an engaging exploration of contemporary German fiction, highlighting significant trends, themes, and notable authors. It delves into the evolution of narrative styles and the cultural context influencing modern storytelling in Germany. Readers can expect a thorough analysis of how recent literary works reflect societal changes and the diverse voices shaping the current literary landscape.

This book examines how German-language authors have intervened in contemporary debates on the obligation to extend hospitality to asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants; the terrorist threat post-9/11; globalisation and neo-liberalism; the opportunities and anxieties of intensified mobility across borders; and whether transnationalism necessarily implies the end of the nation state and the dawn of a new cosmopolitanism. The book proceeds through a series of close readings of key texts of the last twenty years, with an emphasis on the most recent works. Authors include Terézia Mora, Richard Wagner, Olga Grjasnowa, Marlene Streeruwitz, Vladimir Vertlib, Navid Kermani, Felicitas Hoppe, Daniel Kehlmann, Ilija Trojanow, Christian Kracht, and Christa Wolf, representing the diversity of contemporary German-language writing. Through a careful process of juxtaposition and differentiation, the individual chapters demonstrate that writers of both minority and nonminority backgrounds addresstransnationalism in ways that certainly vary but which also often overlap in surprising ways.

Explores the performance of aging in the "late style" of Günter Grass, Ruth Klüger, Christa Wolf, and Martin Walser.Demographers say that by the year 2060, every seventh person in Germany will be aged eighty or older, and every third person over sixty-five. The prediction for other Western countries is scarcely different. Indeed, the aging society is seen by some as a graver threat than even global warming, with potentially unmanageable tensions relating to intergenerational relationships, work and benefits, and flows of people.This book explores the representation and performance of aging in recent "late-style" German-language fiction. It situates the authors chosen as case studies -- Günter Grass, Ruth Klüger, Christa Wolf, and Martin Walser -- in their biographical and social contexts and explores the significance of their aesthetic figuring of aging for debates raging both in Germany and internationally. In particular, the book looks at gender, generations, and trauma and their impact on how writers "narrativize" aging. Finally, it examines the "timeliness" of these different representations and late-style performances of aging in the context of the shift of social, political, and economic power away from the declining societies of theWest to the ascendant societies of the East.Stuart Taberner is Professor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture, and Society at the University of Leeds.

Diversity is one of the defining characteristics of contemporary German-language literature, not just in terms of the variety of authors writing in German today, but also in relation to theme, form, technique and style. However, common themes emerge: the Nazi past, transnationalism, globalisation, migration, religion and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and identity. This book presents the novel in German since 1990 through a set of close readings both of international bestsellers (including Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the World and W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz) and of less familiar, but important texts (such as Yadé Kara's Selam Berlin). Each novel discussed in the volume has been chosen on account of its aesthetic quality, its impact and its representativeness; the authors featured, among them Nobel Prize winners Günter Grass, Elfriede Jelinek and Herta Müller demonstrate the energy and quality of contemporary writing in German.

This volume presents a new approach to the political engagement of three major West German authors, Uwe Johnson, GÜnther Grass and Martin Walser. Whereas analysis of intellectuals' participation in the political upheaval of the late 1960s has tended to focus on speeches written in response to contemporary events, this book examines works of fiction for the way in which authors reflected upon their engagement in a more contemplative medium. Examination of these literary reflections reveals a mismatch between writers' confidence as public intellectuals and their private anxiety.Beginning with a survey of intellectual engagement until the late 1960s, the present volume moves onto a theoretical discussion of the legitimacy of authors' public interventions. Three chapters are devoted to the fiction of Uwe Johnson, GÜnther Grass, and Martin Walser. Uwe Johnson's fiction embodies retreat, an acknowledgment of political impotence. GÜnther Grass's novels present the failings of the engaged intellectual as exemplary to an audience which is expected to learn from this inadequacy. Finally, Martin Walser's intellectual characters stylise private weakness to appeal to a middle-brow audience titillated by the public figure's confession of impotence. In Walser's work, political engagement degenerates into pure form, into a Camp gesture of authors' obsession with their private selves.