Valentina Glajar - Böcker

Two languages-German and Romanian-inform the novels, essays, and collage poetry of Nobel laureate Herta MÜller. Describing her writing as “autofictional,” MÜller depicts the effects of violence, cruelty, and terror on her characters based on her own experiences in Communist Romania under the repressive Nicolae Ceauşescu regime.Herta MÜller: Politics and Aesthetics explores MÜller’s writings from different literary, cultural, and historical perspectives. Part 1 features MÜller’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 MÜller’s texts. Contributors discuss life under the Romanian Communist dictatorship while also stressing key elements of MÜller’s poetics, which promises both self-conscious formal experimentation and political intervention.One of the first books in English to thoroughly examine MÜller’s writing, this volume addresses audiences with an interest in dissident, exile, migration, experimental, and transnational literature.

This collection traces some of the major patterns of representation of East European women in Western art and culture, drawing careful connections between these philosophical, artistic, and cultural constructions and actual historical, sociopolitical realities. The articles analyze a wide array of forms of representation-narrative, theater, opera, journalism, film, and media-over a period of two centuries, in order to demonstrate that certain stereotypical and simplistic views of East European women have long been perpetuated in the Western world. Furthermore, these essays assert that the treatment of women in a given society is directly linked to the ways in which they are seen and represented in the imagination and artistic constructions of that culture.