Arne Höcker co-edits issue “Text & Critique:Gegenwartsliteratur” (The Germanic Review)
Dr. Lilla Balint(University of California Berkeley) and Dr. Arne Höcker(GSLL, ɫƵ) co-edited a special issue of the scholarly journalThe Germanic Reviewwith the title “Text & Critique:Gegenwartsliteratur.” Explore the table of content here:
The special issue revolves around two sets of relations that appear at once self-evident and in need of elaboration: text and critique, on the one hand; and Gegenwart and literature on the other. In the contributions gathered here, literature emerges less as a fixed object than as a malleable set of practices that often position themselves against the very norms by which literary discourse is conventionally defined, evaluated, and categorized. Taken together, these essays present a set of practices that continually renegotiate what literature is, and can be, and do this specifically in regard to literature’s potential to formulate social critique. Central to this negotiation is the question from what position literature can still engage in critique today. Is critique articulated from within literary form itself, through its disruptions and innovations? Does it emerge in dialogue with present-day discourses—political, social, or theoretical—that condition the present? Or does it arise in the tension between literature’s aesthetic autonomy and its responsiveness to historical circumstance?