Border Poetics in German and Polish Literature

Download or read book Border Poetics in German and Polish Literature written by Karolina May-Chu and published by Camden House (NY). This book was released on 2024 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Examines how political borders are intertwined with less concrete borders such as those of ethnicity, gender, or class, and how these entanglements are represented in contemporary novels that reimagine the German-Polish borderlands as cosmopolitan spaces. Globalization notwithstanding, we live in an age of borders, as the ongoing conflict at Europe's eastern edge reminds us. Borders are meant to protect, but they also divide and exclude. This book, however, focuses on literature that pushes back against the divisiveness of borders, advocating for transborder connections and criticizing exclusionary boundaries. It examines novels that reimagine the German-Polish borderlands as cosmopolitan spaces: novels by Nobel Prize winners Olga Tokarczuk and Günter Grass as well as by authors less well known internationally: the Polish Inga Iwasiów, the German Tanja Dückers, and the German-Polish Sabrina Janesch. The book utilizes and elaborates the concept of border poetics, a narrative and cultural practice that places political borders in relation to less concrete borders such as those of gender, ethnicity, or class, as well as in relation to epistemological and ontological boundaries: of language, knowledge, even reality. Because border poetics rests on the same productive tension between the particular and the universal that drives contemporary notions of cosmopolitanism, the book argues for the practice as an instance of what sociologist Gerard Delanty has termed "cosmopolitan imagination." The richly contextualized analysis is framed within transnational German Studies and draws on border studies, cosmopolitanism, European literature, and world literature"--