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German 'Provincialism', the World and Sasa Stanisic's Vor dem Fest (Before the Feast)
Abstract:
In this paper, I examine how notions of the regional, or "provincial", and the transnational, or "worldly", are intertwined in one of the most acclaimed novels of recent years: Saša Stanišić’s Vor dem Fest (Before the Feast), enthusiastically celebrated as "world literature from the Uckermark", was the winner of the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair in 2014. The novel’s success, both on the literary market and in the German feuilleton, not only suggests that Stanišić’s work is appreciated for its aesthetic strategies and narrative, dominated by what can be called musicality. It also shows how an author of a non-German background no longer needs to tell the story of his migration in order to be noticed, but can tell "German stories" of, here, memory and the past, flight and migration, archiving and forgetting, and contribute to his work’s, rather than his public persona’s, perception as "transnational". By reading Vor dem Fest in the context of selected theories of world literature I can show how Stanišić's aesthetically rather engaging look into the local conditions of a specific region in Germany allows him to pursue literary avenues that lead him with his "provincial" text towards "world literature".
- Speaker
- Dr Frauke Matthes
- Venue
- Taylor Building - Room A19
- Contact
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