Volume 6, Issue 1

The aim of this study is to analyze the image of dark women in the bîspel Die Königin von Mohrenland written by Der Stricker, one of the most popular medieval poets. The paper explores and detects the means by which the Moorish queen and her folk are represented and instrumentalized in the short epic entitled bîspel. The depiction of the Moor as the ›dark other‹, ›dark evil‹ etc. or an ›alter ego‹ illustrates premodern approaches to the construction of a stereotype of dark people based on racist, ethnic and religious differences. Such stereotypical depiction contributes to the establishment of the dark other as an enemy. The research questions are discussed from an intercultural perspective which encompasses a discussion of gender, identity and colour (white / dark) and at the same time taking into consideration the historical background of confrontations between the orient and the occident in medieval history.

Based on the analysis of Mutterzunge and Großvaterzunge, this article demonstrates that Özdamar’s mode of dealing with the body and sexuality corresponds to Bakhtin’s concept of the »grotesque body« and that body and language are strongly interwoven. It argues that Özdamar’s »embodied writing« is emancipatory and that it subverts not only patriarchal discourses, but also bourgeois concepts of body, sexuality, and literature. Writing is not only a mental but also a corporeal activity that goes through the body and gives voice to it.

In his novel Himmelfarb, Michael Krüger tells the story of a pretended authorship: A young Nazi anthropologist publishes under his own name the manuscript of his exiled Jewish companion that he mistakes for having died during their expedition to Latin America. Read in a postcolonial context and against the background of Gayatri Spivak’s »Can the Subaltern Speak«, the problem of stolen authorship poses the question of how colonial subjects and their voices can possibly be represented in European literature.

This article discusses the thesis, developed in Emily Apter’s Against World Literature (2013), on the limits of literary translation, using the example of Ilija Trojanow’s Der Weltensammler (2006). The tension between the multilingual worlds of experience in the novel and the seemingly dominant literary monolingualism of the first German publication is addressed in the novel itself as a problem of untranslatability. On the textual level, the novel refuses to be translatable and takes its refuge in Bhabha’s Third Space, »which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is continuously as an integrated, open, expanding code.« I will reveal seven forms of untranslatability that simultaneously open up different interpretive perspectives. In reference to Emily Apter’s monography, untranslatability will be decoded as a textual precondition, and hybridity will be seen as the fundament on which world literature is based upon.