Tamás Lichtmann - Böcker

Postwar British novels have rarely been read in the meticulous, theoretically informed way that seems to be reserved for the classics. The objective of these readings of five postwar British novels (Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited, John Fowles: The French Lieutenant's Woman, William Golding: Sea Trilogy, Jeanette Winterson: The Passion, Ian McEwan: The Innocent) is to turn to wellknown contemporary texts with exactly the kind of sustained attention that they are usually denied. Drawing upon the insights of various poststructuralist theories, the interpretations concentrate on the entanglements of figurativity and narrative in five very different texts. By identifying and exploring the narrative tropes of remembering, seduction, Bildung, desire and initiation, the readings offer new insights into the relationship between figure and narrative, and also reveal the perhaps unsuspected richness of these novels.

Ausgehend von Theorien über die Narration der Nation wird in diesem Buch das Verhältnis zwischen der narrativ strukturierten, sprachlich und sozial konstruierten Nation und der «explizit» narrativen, literarischen Narration (zwischen der «Schweiz» und der «Sprache») näher betrachtet. Dadurch wird einerseits die Schweiz als «Erzählung» behandelt und die geschichtliche Entwicklung der Narration, Struktur und Bildlichkeit der Nation Schweiz sowie die schriftlichen und mündlichen Konstruktionsmedien der nationalen Identität näher beleuchtet. Andererseits werden in den ausgewählten Frisch-Texten die Zusammenhänge zwischen dem Erzähldiskurs des literarischen Textes und verschiedenen Aspekten nationaler und kollektiver Identitätskonstruktion und ihren rhetorischen Strategien aufgezeigt.

The book investigates African American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston’s cultural space. More specifically, different aspects of the interplay of space and place are studied in two of her novels: Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934). Besides representing the peak of her art as a novelist, the novels present fine examples of her philosophy of culture, her conceptions of space, and ways of place construction. The richness and vitality of her novels denote a particular view of culture and an African American way of authentication that enable her to construct a fulfilling cultural universe for the individual, with/despite inbuilt tensions. The cultural space Hurston establishes is embedded in an African American cultural context associated with the South. At the same time her cultural space proves to be diverse, due to inward heterogeneity and external contexts.