Prof. Dr. Ottmar Ette
Professur für französisch- und spanischsprachige Literatur
Publikationen
Ottmar Ette Literature on the moveSpace and Dynamics of Bordercrossing Writings in Europe and AmericaTranslated by Katharina Vester. Amsterdam - New York, NY: Editions Rodopi B.V. (IFAVL Bd. 68) 2003. [316 p.]
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Summary: Literature on the Move
The experience of living after history, in a posthistoire, seems to repeat itself in modern Europe and North America with a certain regularity. There are a number of clues that we have overcome the most recent recurrence of the sensation of living in a post-history. Besides the unmixed phenomenon of multiculturalism and the intercultural phenomenon of mixing, we now have a transcultural phenomenon in which the different cultures penetrate and alter each other. Constant, discrete habitats and residences of cultures belong in their majority to the past.
The point of departure for a bordercrossing literature on the move will be constituted by travel literature, from which the view shall be opened up onto other spaces, dimensions and patterns of movement, which will shape the literatures of the 21st Century. And these will become – one needs no prophetic gift to see – for a major part literatures with no fixed abode.
This book has been written against the background of this new situation and in expectation of a fresh evaluation of cultural aims, which have to be shaped by a structure of space that has been fundamentally changed in territorial and non-territorial respects. It embraces, therefore, in the chronological sense the time/space of modernity and postmodernity between the second half of the 18th and the end of the 20th Century. At the same time it interrogates literature regarding the evolution of spatial concepts, which – often also in dialogue with other media, particularly the visual arts – were meaningful for the last quarter of the second millennium and that emerge above an aesthetic and a »spatiality« of the modern.
Content
Signposts
One
Parcours
Mapping a world on the move
Approaching movement. Dimensions of the travelogue. Literature and traveling. Travel literature as frictional literature. The places of the travelogue: parting, climax, arrival, return. Travel literary place and hermeneutic movement: circle, pendulum, line, star, jump. A travelogue without journey?
Two
Traverse
From the surfacing of America to the disappearing of Europe
America in a bird's flight. Discovery and conquest, circle and line. Experience of the border and border experience. America as divided space. Mobile border texts. American dreams and spaces and the landscapes of theory. The acceleration and disappearing of Europe.
Three
Passage
Eye, ear and the place of writing
Eye and Ear. Place of writing and burning glass. Authorization and textpansion. The eye and the doubled place of writing. Bestseller and longseller, image and text. The gaze upon the reader. Iconotextuality and the staging of the desk. A desk in the jungle. A desk in Berlin.
Four
Passage
Writing in modernity
"Only happy when I do something new." "For the first time saw I the ocean." "To understand the various elements of a wide landscape." "The uniform, hopeless picture of divided mankind." "It narrows the steppe as well as the spirit of the wanderer." "Humboldtian writing."
Five
Traverse
From the modern narrative space to the Orbis Tertius
Story against love. The sculptor and his model. Balzac and his model. The modern narrative model. Balzac's readers. A reader of Balzac. The framing of the reading. Between fiction and diction. Fictions of reading. Encyclopaedia, chance and reading. In Tlöns world. The dissemination of the fantastic within the real. The reality effect. The complete fiction of a modern literature.
Six
Passage
Proteus in Uruguay
Cinematograph and mirror of eternity. Sermon and example. A book in permament becoming. Fragments of a discourse of the soul. Continuous and discontinuous readings. Textmobile and spiritual autobiography.
Seven
Passage
Iphigenia in Mexico
Question of identity and cultural space. New cultural horizons. Model of antiquity and deviation. Iphigenie, cruel. European expansion and American space. Latin American avant-garde and European hearing impairment.
Eight
Traverse
Avant-garde, Post-avant-garde, Postmodernism
Everything is invented. Cubist writing after cubism. Break with the break of tradition. A global painting. The vaccination (of the) avant-garde. A little avant-garde. The rearguard of the avant-garde. Places of reading. Post-avant-garde past-avant-gardian. Post-avant-garde or postmodernism? Post-avant-garde postmodern. Pictures of avant-garde, post-avant-garde and postmodernism. After postmodernism - before the avant-garde?
Nine
Passage
The world inside the head
Of images and after-images. Approaching the city. The city as inner space - the inner space of the city. The struggle of the images. Pictures and counter-images of the city. The city in the underground. After-images of the Shoa.
Ten
Passage
On the swing
Pfeiffer with three f's, and the limits of youth. The baron in the trees and the limits of the game. The girl, the leaves and the limits of showing. The limits of love in the book of youth.
Eleven
Passage as Traverse
Crossing the mangroves
The laboratory of humankind. The logic of the neither - nor and the time of the "dads". The laboratory of Maryse Condé. Novel structure and space structure. Structuring and movement. Hermeneutic movement and transitory identity. Transcultural identity and transitory figuration. The mangroves as tree. The mangrove as root. The mangrove as rhizome. The tree as mangrove. Two logics and the landscapes of theory
Twelve
Return
How the New World appeared in the Old and became in the New the Old World
At the end of movement? Movement and death, movement as death. Letters from the end of the world. Personal description as travelogue. Europe as movement.
Short selected bibliography
Index of names
