Questioning the Canon

To what extent do minority writers feel represented by the literary canon of a nation and its body of "great works"? To what extent do they adhere to, or contest, the supposedly universal values conveyed through those texts and how do they situate their own works within the national tradition? Building on Edward W. Said's contrapuntal readings and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's reflections on the voice of the subaltern, this monograph examines the ways in which Rafik Schami, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Feridun Zaimoglu have re-read, challenged, and adapted the German canon. Similar to other writers in postcolonial contexts, their work on the canon entails an inquiry into history and a negotiation of their relation to the texts and representations that define the "host" nation. Through close analyses of the works of these non-native German authors, the book investigates the intersection between politics, ethics, and aesthetics in their work, focusing on the appropriation and re-evaluation of cultural legacies in German-language literature. Opening up a rich critical dialogue with scholars of German Studies and Postcolonial Theory, Christine Meyer provides a fresh perspective on German-language minority literature since the reunification.

Watch our talk with the editor Christine Meyer here: https://youtu.be/bIOn-8q5QIU

Auteur
Christine Meyer, Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France.

Résumé

Culture and conflict inevitably go hand in hand. The very idea of culture is marked by the notion of difference and by the creative, fraught interaction between conflicting concepts and values. The same can be said of all key ideas in the study of culture, such as identity and diversity, memory and trauma, the translation of cultures and globalization, dislocation and emplacement, mediation and exclusion. This series publishes theoretically informed original scholarship from the fields of literary and cultural studies as well as media, visual, and film studies. It fosters an interdisciplinary dialogue on the multiple ways in which conflict supports and constrains the production of meaning, on how conflict is represented, how it relates to the past and projects the present, and how it frames scholarship within the humanities.

**Editors:
Isabel Capeloa Gil, Catholic University of Portugal, Lisbon, Portugal; Paulo de Medeiros, University of Warwick, UK, Catherine Nesci, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.

**Editorial Board:
**Arjun Appadurai, New York University,
Claudia Benthien, Universität Hamburg,
Elisabeth Bronfen, Universität Zürich,
Bishnupriya Ghosh, University of California, Santa Barbara,
Joyce Goggin, Universiteit van Amsterdam,
Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University,
Ansgar Nünning, Universität Gießen,
Naomi Segal, University of London, Birkbeck College,
Márcio Seligmann-Silva, Universidade Estadual de Campinas,
António Sousa Ribeiro, Universidade de Coimbra,
Roberto Vecchi, Universita di Bologna,
Samuel Weber, Northwestern University,
Liliane Weissberg, University of Pennsylvania,
Christoph Wulf, FU Berlin,
Longxi Zhang, City University of Hong Kong