“Habt ihr was für mich?”: Critical Collectivity in Terézia Mora's “Selbstbildnis mit Geschirrtuch” (2016)

Abstract How can we tell the history of cultural change through migration? This chapter presents a new theoretical and methodological approach, which I developed in response to this question by combining Bourdieu’s field theory with a post-migrant perspective. While my focus is on literary fields, the approach may also serve as an inspiration for exploring similar changes in other fields, including not only the arts but also politics and the economy. Bourdieu’s literary field theory allows us to understand authors and their works as part of a societal process of change. In that respect, it is ideal to grasp how literary fields have changed in response to immigration. Yet, due to his methodological nationalism, Bourdieu ignores nationalisation as a process that implied the drawing of boundaries towards immigrants and their descendants in literary fields on four levels: language, literary traditions, literary themes and the right to state support. These mechanisms of exclusion have become naturalised in nationalised literary fields to such an extent that they were long also accepted by immigrants and their descendants. Only when they began to fight exclusion in and through their literary works did immigrants and their descendants become accepted as authors in literary fields. 

pdf/how-to-tell-the-history-of-cultural-change-through-migration-4c5ui1ecb6.pdf

How to Tell the History of Cultural Change Through Migration: A Post-migrant Field Theoretical Approach

Terezia Mora, the translingual author of Alle Tage, Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent and Das Ungeheuer, demands an unqualified place within German literature, claiming ‘Ich bin genauso deutsch wie Kafka’. With Kafka, Mora chooses an author who shows the importance of Eastern European influences on German literature and how ‘the foreign’, especially the geographically close Eastern European, is, and always has been, part of ‘Germanness.’ I argue that Mora's protagonists seek a form of the German language which allows the expression of specific experience and emotion, and that this flexibility within language is necessary for a more complex contemporary German identity. Only through the openness of Darius Kopp to his wife's translingualism does this protagonist of Mora's latest two novels – and the most emphatically ‘German’ of her characters – come closer to an emotionally meaningful use of the German language, as she returns Kopp to aspects of his identity that he has lost.



Terezia Mora, die translinguistische Autorin von Alle Tage, Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent und Das Ungeheuer, behauptet sie sei ‘genauso deutsch wie Kafka’ und ebenso sehr beteiligt an der deutschen Literatur. Moras Erwahnung von Kafka zeigt die Wichtigkeit des osteuropaischen Einflusses auf die deutsche Literatur. ‘Das Fremde’, besonders das geographisch nahe Osteuropaische, ist, und war immer, Teil des Deutschen. In dieser Arbeit behaupte ich, dass Moras Figuren eine Sprache suchen, die ihre besonderen Erfahrungen und Emotionen ausdrucken kann, und dass diese Flexibilitat der Sprache fur eine erweiterte heutige deutsche Identitat notwendig ist. Nur durch die offene Haltung gegenuber der translinguistischen Sprache seiner Frau findet Darius Kopp (Moras Hauptfigur in den letzten zwei Romanen) eine emotional bedeutsame Sprache, da er durch sie zu verlorenen Aspekten seiner Identitat zuruckfindet.

‘ich bin genauso deutsch wie kafka’: german linguistic identity in the novels of terézia mora

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

Laura Bohn Case

Author Tools

Chat about Author

Papers

‘ich bin genauso deutsch wie kafka’: german linguistic identity in the novels of terézia mora