Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Translations
- Introduction to the Contemporary Short Story in German
- 1 Berlin Shorts: The German Capital in the Short Story of the Twenty-First Century
- 2 The German Crime Story in the Twenty-First Century
- 3 Performance, Performativity, and the Contemporary German Kurzgeschichte
- 4 Cramped Spaces, Creative Bottlenecks: Sudabeh Mohafez’s Das Zehn-Zeilen-Buch and the Short-Short
- 5 Bodo Kirchhoff’s Widerfahrnis: A Novelle for Our Time?
- 6 The Liminal Space of the Short Story: Clemens Meyer’s Die Nacht, die Lichter and Die stillen Trabanten
- 7 Framing the Presence: Judith Hermann’s Lettipark
- 8 Of Unhomed Subjects and Unsettled Voices: Alois Hotschnig’s Die Kinder Beruhigte Das Nicht
- 9 Authorial Development and Fluid Spaces in the “Complete Stories”: Peter Stamm’s Der Lauf Der Dinge
- 10 On Disappearing: Reading Ulrike Almut Sandig with Sylvia Bovenschen
- 11 Metamorphic Becomings: Yoko Tawada’s Opium Für Ovid: Ein Kopfkissenbuch Von 22 Frauen
- 12 Melinda Nadj Abonji and Jurczok 1001: Performance, Politics, and Poetry
- 13 Rhizomatic Wanderings: The Writings of Gabriele Petricek
- 14 Trends and Issues in the Contemporary German-Language Short Story
- Appendix: Contemporary German-Language Short Stories in Translation
- Bibliography of Primary Texts
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
3 - Performance, Performativity, and the Contemporary German Kurzgeschichte
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Translations
- Introduction to the Contemporary Short Story in German
- 1 Berlin Shorts: The German Capital in the Short Story of the Twenty-First Century
- 2 The German Crime Story in the Twenty-First Century
- 3 Performance, Performativity, and the Contemporary German Kurzgeschichte
- 4 Cramped Spaces, Creative Bottlenecks: Sudabeh Mohafez’s Das Zehn-Zeilen-Buch and the Short-Short
- 5 Bodo Kirchhoff’s Widerfahrnis: A Novelle for Our Time?
- 6 The Liminal Space of the Short Story: Clemens Meyer’s Die Nacht, die Lichter and Die stillen Trabanten
- 7 Framing the Presence: Judith Hermann’s Lettipark
- 8 Of Unhomed Subjects and Unsettled Voices: Alois Hotschnig’s Die Kinder Beruhigte Das Nicht
- 9 Authorial Development and Fluid Spaces in the “Complete Stories”: Peter Stamm’s Der Lauf Der Dinge
- 10 On Disappearing: Reading Ulrike Almut Sandig with Sylvia Bovenschen
- 11 Metamorphic Becomings: Yoko Tawada’s Opium Für Ovid: Ein Kopfkissenbuch Von 22 Frauen
- 12 Melinda Nadj Abonji and Jurczok 1001: Performance, Politics, and Poetry
- 13 Rhizomatic Wanderings: The Writings of Gabriele Petricek
- 14 Trends and Issues in the Contemporary German-Language Short Story
- Appendix: Contemporary German-Language Short Stories in Translation
- Bibliography of Primary Texts
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
Words themselves … lay bare the way that, in order to understand an object, you first of all have to write something on it, I mean really describe it. Someone else then reads what's been written on this object, but obviously not the object itself. That is, of course, the great presumption of art—that it goes around describing everything like graffiti artists in a city. On the other hand, you simply can't talk about an object that hasn't been described.
—Roman EhrlichAS A MATERIAL-DISCURSIVE PRACTICE, the short story is performative: it does things with words, producing cognitive, affective, and social effects through the combined structural constraints of language, genre, and material, or digital text. More so than other narrative forms, the short story is ideally suited to stage the performance of self, due to its fragmentary form and its often pronounced dialogic qualities. By offering a systematic analysis of the most significant performative qualities at play in the contemporary German-language short story, in this chapter I offer an original approach to the form, itself a somewhat neglected object of study. The intersection of this theoretical paradigm—performativity—and the short-story genre developed here represents an innovative application, which will extend understandings of the short story and its impact within and beyond the German-language context today. Ultimately, I contend that the concept of literary performativity furthers the case for the transformative impact and social value of literature per se.
As Judith Butler argues, identities arise through the processes of performativity, which necessarily entail an audience. As with novels, plays, and narrative poetry, the short-story form allows for the representational performance of diegetically constrained identities—in short, characters— whose perspective the reader shares through the first-person voice or the guidance of a narrator. The identity of the “short story” itself accretes through the performance of language constructed in the form of a generically framed narrative, composed in a chain of deracinated signifiers that nonetheless exist in material-textual form and conjure up a slice of a world. For short-story writer and novelist Roman Ehrlich, this process evokes the creative and taxonomical work of the graffiti artist: words, like “tags” sprayed on the walls of a city, are arbitrary and unstable, but nevertheless necessary to identify and employ a mode of successful communication.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century , pp. 51 - 75Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2020