Herta M_ller: Politics and Aesthetics

Bettina Brandt · Valentina Glajar

Nov 2013 · U of Nebraska Press

About this ebook

Two languages?German and Romanian?inform the novels, essays, and collage poetry of Nobel laureate Herta M_ller. Describing her writing as ?autofictional,? M_ller depicts the effects of violence, cruelty, and terror on her characters based on her own experiences in Communist Romania under the repressive Nicolae Ceau?escu regime.

Herta M_ller: Politics and Aesthetics explores M_ller?s writings from different literary, cultural, and historical perspectives. Part 1 features M_ller?s Nobel lecture, five new collage poems, and an interview with Ernest Wichner, a German-Romanian author who has traveled with her and sheds light on her writing. Parts 2 and 3, featuring essays by scholars from across Europe and the United States, address the political and poetical aspects of M_ller?s texts. Contributors discuss life under the Romanian Communist dictatorship while also stressing key elements of M_ller?s poetics, which promises both self-conscious formal experimentation and political intervention.

One of the firstøbooks in Englishøto thoroughly examine M_ller?s writing, this volume addresses audiences with an interest in dissident, exile, migration, experimental, and transnational literature.

About the author

Bettina Brandt taught at MIT, Columbia University, and Montclair State before joining the faculty at Pennsylvania State University. She has published on contemporary women writers such as Emine Èzdamar and Yoko Tawada. Valentina Glajar is a professor of German at Texas State University, San Marcos. She is the coauthor of several books, including Local History, Transnational Memory in the Romanian Holocaust, and is the cotranslator of M_ller?s Traveling on One Leg.