A01=Monika Shafi
Aesthetic
Architectural
Arno Geiger
Author_Monika Shafi
Barbara Honigmann
Belonging
Category=DSBH
Category=DSK
Contemporary German Narratives
Domestic Space
Emine Sevgi Ozdamar
Emotional Experiences
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Financial Investment
German Literature
Housebound
Houses
Identity Politics
Jenny Erpenbeck
Judith Hermann
Katharina Hacker
Monika Maron
Monika Shafi
Selfhood
Social Traditions
Walter Kappacher
Product details
- ISBN 9781571135247
- Weight: 500g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Oct 2012
- Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Reveals and analyzes the current strong emphasis in German literature on the role of houses and homes in our constructions of selfhood and belonging.
In life and in fiction, houses are compelling objects that shape an impressive range of personal and public affairs. A house embodies experiences often intensely emotional, and it also represents both a major financial investmentand a material reality embedded in architectural, aesthetic, and social traditions. The house, the place where we try to be at home, can be regarded -- as theorists from Gaston Bachelard to Edward S. Casey have argued -- as the key space for our constructions of selfhood and belonging.
A host of contemporary German narratives featuring houses highlight this relationship between selfhood and domestic space. Beginning with a historical and theoretical overview of the house in German literature, Housebound analyzes the shelters -- often highly ambivalent spaces -- that writers such as Katharina Hacker, Arno Geiger, Walter Kappacher, Monika Maron, Jenny Erpenbeck, Judith Hermann, Barbara Honigmann, and Emine Sevgi Özdamar build in their texts and what these reveal about contemporary selfhood in Germany and its relationship to the social world. The concluding comparative analysis of Katharina Hacker's Die Habenichtse and the English novelist Ian McEwan's Saturday reveals these developments in another national literature and makes a case for the global appeal of the domestic as a major site of identity politics.
Monika Shafi is the Elias Ahuja Professor of German and Chair of the Department of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware.
