Attached To Dispossession Sacrificial Narratives In Post Imperial Europe

An account of the post-imperial disintegration of East Central Europe. In its aftermath, the disintegrated parts passionately cleave to their dispossession by generating political and literary sacrificial narratives. The monograph investigates their interaction.

This book proposes a new departure point for the investigation of transnational literary alliances: the traumatic constellation of translatio imperii, which followed the dissolution of the East-Central European empires in the 1920s and the crumbling of the West European colonial empires in the 1950s. To prevent their breakdown, the former transitioned from a ‘sovereign’ to a ‘disciplinary’ mode of administration of their peripheries, the latter from the merciless assimilation of their colonial constituencies to their affirmative regeneration. This book treats Franz Kafka as the writer of the first transition, prefiguring J. M. Coetzee as the writer of the second. In a series of close readings, it investigates the particular ways in which the restructuring of power relations between the agencies in their fictions is a response to the delineated post-imperial reconfiguration of the new countries’ governmental techniques. By displacing their narrative authority beyond the reach of their readers, they laid bare the sudden withdrawal of transcendental guarantees from the world of human commonality. This entailed an unstable and elusive configuration of their fictional worlds as a key feature of post-imperial literature.

The breakups of empires engendered in the newly established East Central European states both public and private feelings of dispossession. This gave rise to collective (historical) and individual (fictional) trauma narratives. The volume investigates their intended and unintended interaction

What is the contemporary status of a perceived “European” identity? This book addresses the complex negotiations around the lingering shadow of Eurocentrism, now increasingly challenged by intra-European crises and by the emergence of autonomously non-European perceptions of Europe.

This volume opens the series of papers presented at the Vienna Congress of AILC/ICLA 2016, beginning with eight keynotes. Thirty-four further papers are dedicated to the central theme of the conference: the linguistic side of world literature, under different focal points. The volume further contains five roundtables, the papers of a workshop of the UNESCO memory of the worlds programme, a presentation of the avldigital.de platform, as well as several bibliographically enriched overviews of the special lexicography of comparative literature, up to date versions of the ICLA publications, and an example of multiple translations of a famous modern classic.

Policing Literary Theory is an exploration of the complex relationship between literature/literary theory and police/policing.

The first reference work to provide an integrated and authoritative body of information about the political, cultural and economic contexts of postcolonial literatures that have their provenance in the major European Empires of Belgium, Denmark, France, G