Konzepte der Interkulturalität in der Germanistik weltweit ed. by Renata Cornejo, Gesine Lenore Schiewer and Manfred Weinberg

Abstract

Reviewed by: Konzepte der Interkulturalität in der Germanistik weltweit ed. by Renata Cornejo, Gesine Lenore Schiewer and Manfred Weinberg Silja Weber Konzepte der Interkulturalität in der Germanistik weltweit. Edited by Renata Cornejo, Gesine Lenore Schiewer, and Manfred Weinberg. Bielefeld: transcript, 2020. Pp. 432. Paper €50.00. ISBN 978-3-8376-5041-9. There was a time when a collection of articles on intercultural matters in the field of Germanistik would focus narrowly on "migrant literature" and its representation of cultural positioning. This volume, ambitiously including the word "worldwide" in its title and designed to be the first in a series on the topic, is evidence of the richness gained by an arrangement that lives up to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of rhizomatic knowledge structures. German is presented as a "relais language," a conduit with many entrances and exits which provides a loose limitation for relevance, and the collection itself is a relais place where thoughts and methodologies from different disciplines, including linguistics and pedagogy, can meet. The volume is a documentation of papers presented at the conference on Interkulturelle Germanistik in Ústí nad Labem and Prague in 2016. Subsections of the volume reflect topic strands at the conference, and six plenary talks from the six continents on knowledge production and the understanding of German studies in different areas of the world are also included. The three major sections focus on theory, intercultural linguistics/multilingualism, and intercultural literature and film. The latter is the most expansive, taking up over half of the volume, and is further divided into subsections focusing on Chamisso literature, migration and displacement, and identities and their relation to contexts. The focus of individual chapters ranges from close readings of individual works and comparative analysis of works by authors from similar intercultural constellations through broad discussions of intercultural aspects of particular geographical regions or social phenomena. The most striking feature is, perhaps, that the contributions are truly heterogeneous in authorship, methodology, focus, and level of detail, so that, by design, they occasionally appear to dissolve the superficially clear and linear structure of sections and subsections; this intrinsic dissolution of standardized presentation extends even to the interculturally shaped English of the abstracts preceding each article, which I feel is a rare and valuable aspect (in contrast, the language of the articles themselves is standard academic German throughout). While it feels problematic to choose what particular contributions should be mentioned in a review when the volume weaves such a complex web of voices, a few articles can convey a skeletal sense of that web. Paul Michael Lützeler's self-reflective [End Page 192] discussion of language policy and expectations at the GSA and various other German-promoting associations is an incisive and relevant reminder of the different political impacts of English and German in these contexts. Benoît Ellerbach's chapter on the hermeneutics of Schami's work provides a very useful discussion of terms that have been used for intercultural literature over time, as well as changes and inconsistencies in the author's own perspective on his work versus its framing by media and literary analysis. It makes a clear case in favor of letting complexities and inconsistencies reveal themselves and against resorting to reductive universalizing tendencies, whether across authors or across time. Raluca Rădulescu traces a fascinating connection between the poetic responses to experiences of Sprachkrise by Lorca, Benn, and Celan and the corresponding response in the work of José F.A. Oliver, who draws on imagery from both Lorca and Celan but reimagines its meaning. Riham Tahoun investigates how the intertextuality of a given text is developed both through its own discursive practices and its reception, using Navid Kermani's work as a base to show both de-construction (dissolution of culturally shaped semantic networks) and construction (the formation of new constellations of meaning that are both more open and more tolerant of contradictoriness). Based on several recent novels about refugees in Germany such as Jenny Erpenbeck's Gehen, ging, gegangen and Abbas Khider's Ohrfeige, another convincing contribution is Manar Omar's discussion of refugees as a literary phenomenon that places them at the balance point between being world-less and...