Literature as Discourse and Dialogue: Rapport Management (Facework) in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s ‘Blackeye and His Donkey’

Abstract

When national newspaper Die Zeit requested that she express her opinion about current (here: early 1990s, post-unification) relations between Germans and minorities (Ausländer), highly acclaimed author, actress and playwright Emine Sevgi Özdamar responded with a vignette titled, ‘Blackeye and His Donkey’ (‘Schwarzauge und sein Esel’). Özdamar, who was born in Turkey but has lived much of her adult life in Düsseldorf and Berlin, warned the editors in a letter, ‘I am writing something. But it is completely different from what you expect’ (1993: 1).1 With the final clause Özdamar locates her text within a particular field of linguistic practice in which expectations are managed and negotiated based on previous textual experiences and in this way the author points directly to the ‘horizon of expectations’ or ‘discourse world’ or ‘frame of relevance’ that she anticipates her readers share. Her response, a literary anecdote about her experiences directing the play Blackeye in Germany (originally titled in Turkish and German as Karagöz in Alemania and Schwarzauge in Deutschland respectively), is also, importantly, an act of what Erving Goffman called ‘footing’ (1981), in that Özdamar aligns herself differentially to the interaction initiated by Die Zeit. While the first observation relates to discourse in the post-Foucauldian sense in which it is most often understood in contemporary literary and cultural studies,2 this second observation opens up a very different line of interrogation.KeywordsLiterary WorkLiterary TextIdentity FaceIllocutionary ForceGuest WorkerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.