Revolutionary Subjects German Literatures and the Limits of Aesthetic Solidarity with Latin America

• Main Author: Trnka, Jamie H
• Format: eBook
• Language: English
• Published: Germany De Gruyter 2015; Walter de Gruyter GmbH
• Edition: 1
• Series: Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies
• Subjects: 1929-1995; 1939; 1943; 20th century; Braun, Volker; Criticism and interpretation; Criticism and Theory; Delius, Friedrich Christian; Enzensberger, Hans Magnus; Geoculture; German Literature; History and criticism; In literature; Latin America; LITERARY CRITICISM; LITERARY CRITICISM / European / German; Literatures of Germanic languages; Müller, Heiner; Politics in literature; Criticism and Theory; German Literature; Geoculture; Latin America
• ISBN: 3110376555; 9783110376555; 9783110392883; 3110392887; 9783110376227; 3110376229
• DOI: 10.1515/9783110376555

Revolutionary Subjects explores the literary and cultural significance of Cold War solidarities and offers insight into a substantial and under-analyzed body of German literature concerned with Latin American thought and action. It shows how literary interest in Latin America was vital for understanding oppositional agency and engaged literature in East and West Germany, where authors developed aesthetic solidarities that anticipated conceptual reorganizations of the world connoted by the transnational or the global. Through a combination of close readings, contextual analysis, and careful theoretical work, Revolutionary Subjects traces the historicity and contingency of aesthetic practices, as well as the geocultural grounds against which they unfolded, in case studies of Volker Braun, F.C. Delius, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Heiner Müller. The book's cultural and comparative approach offers an antidote to imprecise engagements with the transnational, historicizing critical impulses that accompany the production of disciplinary boundaries. It paves the way for more reflexive debate on the content and method of German Studies as part of a broader landscape of world literature, comparative literature and Latin American Studies.