Band 131, Heft 1

The contribution highlights the overwhelming importance of narrative for human life. It takes its point of departure from a hypothetically negative assumption: the fiction of an anti-utopian island ‘Udiegesia’, whose inhabitants have lost the ability to narrate. A scenario detailing what would presumably happen in such a case leads on to a (positive) survey of the manifold fields in which narrative is in fact used as a cognitive frame to make sense of, provide orientation in, and a ‘fitness training’ for, life and human societies, a survey which is - in part - inspired by Brian Boyd’s propagation of ‘evocriticism’.2 In the concluding section the claim that all human knowledge is “based on stories”3 will receive brief critical attention. It will be argued that such an exclusive stance is as problematical as the idea that the complexities of narrative’s forms and its various functions for human life can be fully explained by evolutionary theory alone.

Post-colonial rewritings of European classics have been categorized either as texts which perpetuate colonial structures, or as ‘canonical counterdiscourses’, which stand in clear opposition to the source text. Appropriations of Shakespeare, in particular, have been the target of such polarized readings, which all seem to be based on the assumption that literary texts are fixed discourses. In my essay I shall try to counter the narrow post-colonial conceptualisation of the counter-discourse by taking a closer look at Othello-rewritings, with a special focus on African Murray Carlin’s play Not Now, Sweet Desdemona. As will be illustrated, Carlin’s text, just like so many other Shakespeare rewritings, draws on the ambiguities inherent in the pre-text, in order to engage in a dialogue with the Renaissance tragedy and activate its relevancies for modern post-colonial societies in a global context. The article thus proposes a new approach to Shakespeare rewritings, one that considers the pretexts’ polyvalence and one that exchanges notions of counter-discursivity with notions of textual and cultural reciprocity.

This essay re-reads early American sentimental novels (Charlotte Temple, The Coquette, Emily Hamilton) through the lens of contemporaneous European aesthetics (Baumgarten, Schiller) to argue that American writers’ anxieties concerning the power of their work to either educate or deceive are more than defensive responses to the novel’s detractors. These anxieties are real: they testify to concerns about the reliability of sensuous perception that also haunt early European aestheticians. Once we realize this, we see that sentimental writers do not, as major theorists of sentimentalism claim, unconditionally affirm the expression of feelings. Instead, they advocate what I call sympathy control.

Susan Sontag, in a famous essay called “Fascinating Fascism”, first published in 1974, argues that Leni Riefenstahl, who by that time had made a conspicuous come-back as a photographer in the U.S., had always and would always adhere to fascist aesthetics. This essay seeks to demonstrate that as early as 1936, when Riefenstahl began to work on her film Olympia (1938), she had already discarded fascist aesthetics and replaced it by a yearning for what Dreyfus and Kelly, in their important 2011 study, All Things Shining, would call the secular transcendence attaching to sports events that involve top athletes. Since Riefenstahl wanted, and actually managed, to capture such moments of secular transcendence during the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin through her technical perfection as a film director, she had already implicitly begun to enter on a career which - if we allow for David Foster Wallace’s belief that top athletes fascinate Americans by appealing to their twin obsessions with competitive superiority and hard data - would eventually resemble a typically American career, whereas Sontag’s philosophical attitude remained firmly rooted in European thought until her death in 2004. The careers of these two famous women therefore call for a reconsideration of what we tend to regard as the primary importance of the immediate historico-cultural context of a person’s life.

In the following, I explore the mutually enriching dialogue between the grotesque (based on Mikhail Bakhtin) and postcolonial literature that provides a leitmotif in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses on multiple levels: first and foremost, it defines the migrant protagonists’ experience as one of metamorphosis, transgression and change; in the grotesque just as in the experience of migration, the familiar and the unfamiliar conflate, and this is foregrounded in The Satanic Verses in striking manner: the protagonists Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta transform physically into grotesquely jointed creatures, one an incarnation of the archangelic divine, the other a goatish Satan. In so, the often violent physicality of the grotesque foregrounds the migrant’s identity formation to be one in which the self not only encounters, but physically integrates and eventually transforms constructions of alterity. In very concise terms, identity here emerges to be a relational process, and this is the reason, too, why the grotesque has been hailed as a new form of postcolonial ethics1 concerned with representations of alterity. The grotesque, however, is also a transformatory force, which overtopples hierarchies and binary oppositions. In The Satanic Verses, the migrant protagonists are thus empowered, by way of their transformations, not only to cross but temporarily to displace borders; their chimerical forms interact with the narrative structure and multiple voices of the text to question the value of cultural hierarchies and divides. The grotesque opens up these borderlines into spaces of hybridity and creative energy, and takes effect, too, on the discourses of fundamentalism that are deconstructed in the text itself and became decisive in the notoriously dramatic aftermath of its publication.

The article argues that Coetzee’s novel Disgrace positions the animal not only as opposed to protagonist David Lurie but also in him. The novel dramatizes this by focusing on Eros: Lurie gradually replaces his idea of desire derived from the Romantics (Wordsworth, Coleridge) with an idea of instinct that suggests Eros to be common to humans and animals. I argue that Lurie ultimately arrives at a stance similar to that of Diogenes of Sinope, the contemporary of Plato and main representative of the Cynics. Seen against this background, Lurie’s metamorphosis into a ‘dog-man’ becomes readable as recognition of his own animality, a recognition that has decisive consequences for an ethical reading of the novel.