Minor Literature Research Articles

Kafka's Other Prague: Writings from the Czechoslovak Republic

Kafka's Other Prague: Writings from the Czechoslovak Republic

Speculative Pragmatism and Minor Practices in Palestine: The Art of Living and the Cultivation of Futures

This paper considers the aesthetic-political dimension in Palestine and in particular looks at how possible Palestinian futures that emerge from it are evident in what I call ‘minor practices’. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of minor literature, minor practices work within the interstices of the occupation and draw upon what is around them in a radically creative way. Aesthetics then is not only a subjective realm linked to an art object or beauty but can be understood as a way of grasping and feeling the world. Whereas the dominant literature on aesthetics and politics reads the art object backward to the intentions of the artist and focuses on the visual, this paper aims to attend to the generative and forward-moving forces that come together in the process of making. By taking the example of a women’s embroidery co-operative in the West Bank, it demonstrates that speculative pragmatism enables us to attend to the moreness in minor practices, aesthetics, and life itself, and how it can vector alternative futures. A speculative pragmatist approach makes perceptible how minor practices can offer space for people to release new energies and forms of creativity, that themselves can produce new potentialities and the soul of a new society. Aesthetics is thus capable of making the potentialities of life felt not only through fine art, but perhaps most keenly, through minor practices that, stitch by stitch, instaurate new arts of living. Article received: April 25, 2020; Article accepted: June 6, 2020; Published online: October 15, 2020; Original scholarly paper

ARTICULATING THE MARGINALIZED VOICES: SYMBOLISM IN AFRICAN AMERICAN, HISPANIC, AND ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

The present study contextualizes how symbolism is employed by writers of ethnically minority in the United States as an avenue of their agency and criticism against the dominant white perspective. The history of American minorities is marred with legacy of racial discrimination and segregation which highlights the inequality of race. Literature as a cultural production captures the experiences of the marginalized and the use of symbolism is intended to transform themes into the field of aesthetics. This study is a qualitative research which is conducted through the post-nationalist American Studies framework in order to focus on the minorities’ experience instead of the Anglo-Saxon outlook. The object of the study is three playscripts written from authors from Mexican-American, African-American and Asian-American to emphasize how discrimination is faced by multi-ethnic. The finding suggests how symbolism in these literary works intends to counter the stereotypical representation of Mexican-American, aligns with the passive resistance of the Civil Right Movement and subvert binary opposition of East and West which exoticizing the East. Keywords : minority literature in the U.S , symbolism, post-national

O marginal na formação do leitor

Este artigo se propõe a debater a importância da Literatura Marginal, surgida a partir dos anos 2000, para a formação leitora, visando estabelecer a relação entre a produção desses autores e a emergência de um movimento que busca a sua legitimação fora da série literária canônica. Logo, pensando na relação existente entre as literaturas de minorias e as práticas e orientações que norteiam a formação do leitor é que este trabalho busca problematizar como a formação leitora pode, por meio de obras da Literatura Marginal, promover uma efetiva inserção dos chamados grupos sociais minoritários ou marginalizados nas práticas de letramento e que contribuem para o desenvolvimento linguístico do leitor em formação. Ainda, tem-se por objetivo deste artigo avaliar como a Literatura Marginal pode contribuir para uma diversificação e inclusão de conteúdos e temáticas culturais periféricas nas práticas de formação do leitor. Cabe ressaltar que não somente a adoção de textos de autores vinculados à Literatura Marginal (ou a outras literaturas de minorias) é que solucionará todo e qualquer problema relacionado à diversidade temática na formação do leitor. Contudo, se deseja que o presente debate inicie uma reflexão e possível ressignificação das práticas e objetivos que envolvam a formação de leitores, a partir da adoção de manifestações literárias variadas, que nem ao menos são mencionadas nos currículos.

From Roots to Rhizomes: Similarity and Difference in Contemporary German Postmigrant Literature

There has traditionally been some divergence in the interpretive paradigms used by scholars analysing minority literature in the Germanophone and Anglophone contexts. Whereas the Anglosphere has tended to utilize poststructural and postcolonial approaches, interculturality and transculturality are favoured in the German-speaking world. However, these positions are aligning more closely, as the concept of similarity is gaining ground in Germany, disrupting the self–other binary in what can be regarded as a shift from the idea of roots to rhizomes. In dialogue with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, the paradigm of similarity will be explored in terms of culture in Zafer Şenocak’s essay collection Das Fremde, das in jedem wohnt: Wie Unterschiede unsere Gesellschaft zusammenhalten (The Foreign that Resides in Everyone: How Differences Hold Our Society Together, 2018), which explores the similarities between Turkish and German culture alongside their internal differences; in terms of language in Uljana Wolf’s poetry cycle “DICHTionary” (2009), which seeks out links between German and English through ‘false friends’; and in terms of religion in Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel’s play Nathan Messias (Nathan Messiah 2006), which raises questions about interreligious dialogue. All three texts challenge binary notions of identity in favour of a more complex, rhizomatic network of relations.

Contact Zones and Liminal Spaces in Okinawan and Zainichi Contemporary Art

This article focuses on selected art works by third-generation Zainichi Koreans Haji Oh and Soni Kum, and Okinawan-based Chikako Yamashiro to explore ways in which these artists have continued to develop innovative, interdisciplinary practices to explore contact zones and liminal spaces in the East Asian context. Drawing on Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s notion of minor transnationalism, it argues the creative interventions of the three artists shed light on complex histories of minor transnationalism and at the same time alert us to ways in which the legacies of colonialism, migration and war continue to evolve in the present in Okinawa, Jeju Island, and Japan. Deploying different media, practices and techniques, all three artists aim to deterritorialize dominant visual and historical narratives and draw inspiration from minor literatures in ways that disrupt binary and vertical relationships, making visible minor to minor connections and ways of envisioning horizontal networks.

Hybrid Geographies of Global Genres: The Global Space in the Romanian Modern Novel

My paper aims to investigate an early phase of the globalization phenomenon as it has manifested in a specific peripheral space, attempting to map, by means of both close and distant reading, how the internalization processes have been mirrored in the modern Romanian novel. The scope of my research revolves around the responses that Romanian literature – a peripheral, minor literature – has had towards transnational or global models, and how the novelistic production of the aforementioned timeframe has metabolised and illustrated the foreign input in our culture. The theoretical framework of the present

Writing of Contemporary National Literary History in Finland and Hungary – a Comparative Approach

The discourse on the writing of national literary histories is still in progress due to the postcolonial and transnational turn. In the frameworks of these literary theories, the meaning of national has been reshaped by focusing on the territorial, ethnic and language borders of contemporary literature. The theory of literary history writing had to face the issues of defining the phenomenon of migrant, emigrant and minority literature. A new Hungarian book titled Kik vagytok ti? Kötelező magyar irodalom – Újraélesztő könyv (Who Are You? Compulsory Hungarian Literature – A Revitalizing Book) (2019), also evoked a debate concerning the theoretical issues of Hungarian literary history writing. In this debate, not only the author and his critics confronted but also the critics with one another. By analysing the critiques and the author’s answers, the fundamental questions of the national literary history writing can be identified. With this metadiscursive approach, I aim to present the current state of Hungarian national literary history writing focusing on the minority and emigrant literature. I will compare the questions generated by the migrant literature in Finland to the issues emerging in the debate about Hungarian literature. This comparative and metadiscursive approach helps to understand the shaping process of the national literature in the dynamics of canonizations and marginalisation.

Minor Literature in the Case of Brina Svit

The article draws on the Deleuzoguattarian conceptualisation of minor literature in order to analyse the literature of Brina Svit. The concepts of (de)territorialisation (schizophrenia), minor, and other attributes of minor literature are employed in the comparative analysis of different literary elements of four of Brina Svit’s novels. The article outlines the ‘line of flight’ (defined as deterritorialisation, de-oedipisation, politicalness, and collectiveness) that manifests itself from Svit’s novels written in Slovenian to the novels written in French. The literature of Brina Svit is placed in between minor literature and minority literature.

Przypadkowy turysta? John Maxwell Coetzee w Europie Środkowej – rekonesans

The article’s aim is to reflect upon the transgenerational and transnational sustainability of Central European memory in literary and cultural space of South Africa. It also investigates links between John Maxwell Coetzee’s oeuvre, as well as works by other South African authors (e.g. Dan Jacobson, Lionel Abrahams, Deborah Levy), with cultural and, above all, literary universe of Central Europe. While analysing selected literary and cultural texts (among others, hitherto unpublished archival documents), the author points to the fact that the Nobel laureate’s consistently and programmatically displayed interest in Central Europe ought to be considered within a wider context of systematic and creative “dialogue” with Central Europe which has been carried out by writers and artists from South Africa in the 20th and 21st centuries. The present study is an original attempt at capturing the phenomenon of mutual cultural flows and horizontal exchange taking place between some minor literatures (and cultures), in this case: South African and Central European.

‘Tchaikovsky is ours:’ the practice of minor music from the barrios of Venezuela

ABSTRACT How do young people living in social exclusion in Venezuela negotiate their deep personal attachment to classical music and the genre’s association with dominant European culture? I approach this topic through my ethnographic fieldwork with young musicians who are members of Venezuela’s nation-wide classical music program El Sistema. The majority of these musicians are from the lower social classes in an unequal society deeply divided along the intersecting lines of race, ethnicity, and class. Transposing Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature to music, I propose the notion of ‘minor music’ to explore the relationship between classical music practices, social exclusion, and aspiration. Minor music sheds light on how people on the margins of society inhabit dominant identities strategically, critically, and by making them ‘their own.’ Through a focus on the experiences of the young performers, I explore how they may articulate an individual and collective self within and through the medium of dominant categories. This has the simultaneous effect of both reproducing deep-rooted ethno-racial and economic hierarchies, while also infusing dominant identities with contrary forms of creativity and meaning embedded in the musicians' marginal social positions.

Not So Little Literatures: Reading Barbara Honigmann With (and Against) Deleuze and Guattari

Although a number of critics have applied the term ‘minor literature’ to the German Jewish writer Barbara Honigmann, this article proceeds on the assumption that the last word may not have been spoken on how it might be possible and desirable to apply Deleuze and Guattari to that author. In it, I extend the discourse established by Deleuze and Guattari beyond the colonial context and apply it to Barbara Honigmann in her capacity as a Jewish writer. This also involves reading what Honigmann writes about three other Jewish women writers both in the light of, and as a critique of, that Deleuze-Guattarian discourse, occasionally going back to Kafka in the process. And the conclusion is that, while Deleuze and Guattari can prove useful in drawing attention to certain traits of literatures produced by members of minorities writing as such, the dangers involved in trying to reclaim pejorative sobriquets remain incalculable, and that terms such as ‘minor literature’ are therefore probably best avoided when discussing major authors like Barbara Honigmann. Tweetable Abstract: In what sense can Jewish women writers be called ‘minor’? Robert Gillett explores this question with reference to Barbara Honigmann, a justly celebrated contemporary German Jewish woman writer, and in sometimes lively debate with Deleuze and Guattari on Kafka.

The Identity Politics of Uncertainty: Eva Menasse’s Quasikristalle (2013)

This article argues, through a close reading of Eva Menasse’s Quasikristalle [Quasicrystals] (2013), that Menasse can be more productively viewed as a minority author, rather than as a minor author. The concept of minority authorship proposed here with reference to Menasse is in dialogue with but departs significantly from the conception of minor literature that Deleuze and Guattari adapted from Kafka’s writings on the literatures of smaller nations and communities. More specifically, this article proposes that we understand the notion of “minority” in contemporary literature as a contextual feature relating to authors’ public identities, that is, the ways in which authors represent themselves, are marketed and received, rather than an innate political and linguistic feature of literary texts. By reading Menasse’s feminist op-eds and her essays on the cultural differences between (Jewish) Vienna and Berlin alongside Quasikristalle, with its focus on women’s lives and relationships on the one hand, and the experiences of Austrian Jewish emigres in Germany on the other, the article shows that minority literature can be both mainstream and political, both explicit about its concerns and subtle in its undermining of stereotypes about minority identities. Tweetable Abstract: This article reads Menasse’s Quasikristalle as minority literature, rather than as minor literature in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense.

Webs and Threads and Shirts of Destiny: Textile Imagery and the Aesthetics of Transmission in Barbara Honigmann’s Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben (2004) and Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (2014)

Daughter narrators in autobiographical and autofictional texts by contemporary Jewish women writers such as Barbara Honigmann and Katja Petrowskaja employ textile imagery to overcome traumatic ruptures and losses of tradition. The history of (Jewish) embroidery and needlework in general is being evoked and alluded to in their literary texts, often via the character of the grandmother. The act of translation from cultural technique to literary text enables the writers to reconnect with Jewish and female artistic traditions, establishing new transnational genealogies of female artistic creation. Honigmann’s own female and Jewish version of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s ‘minor literature’ and Natalia Ginzburg’s concept of a poetry of ‘nothing much’ advocate a commitment to a poetics of the domestic and the seemingly trivial with a decidedly subversive edge. Both aesthetic approaches turn exclusion from male genealogies of literary and religious authority into a strength, asking questions about truth, memory, belonging and the problem of both traumatic and cultural inheritance. Tweetable Abstract: The use of textile and domestic imagery in the literature of contemporary Jewish women authors serves as a strategy to overcome genealogical and traumatic ruptures.

‘dass diese tauben Geschichten aufflattern’: Narrative, Translingual Creativity and Belonging in Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (2014)

This article argues that reading Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther in the context of minor literature as a literature of deterritorialisation highlights its sense of liberation and emphasises the creation of associations – aspects that are crucial to this transnational and translingual book about retrieving memory across space and time. Going beyond the idea of a binary relationship between minor and major literature and instead focusing on rhizomatic affiliation emerges as key. A wider framework of analysis is also provided by ideas that derive from or have been developed in conjunction with Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking: the idea of minor transnationalism (Francoise Lionnet, Shu-Mei Shih), the concepts of multi- and translingualism (Leslie Adelson, Steven G. Kellman) and the ethics of relationality (Sara Ahmed) and multidirectionality in postmemory discourses (Hirsch, Rothberg). Combined, these ideas prove to be useful tools for understanding Petrowskaja’s handling of narrative, language and belonging in Vielleicht Esther.

Relational Subjectivity: Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Novel Außer Sich

Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s debut novel, published in 2017, covers the experience of antisemitism, migration, queerness and political struggle during a 100-year time span. Its structure is anything but straightforward and features homo- as well as heterodiegetic narrators. Structurally, the novel can be related to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, with its analysis of the logic of Kafka’s writings. Rosi Braidotti’s work on nomadic ethics and on the posthuman supplements the framework given by Deleuze and Guattari. Drawing on these writings, my analysis foregrounds the concept of the relational subject as developed in the novel as well as the link between its narrative structure and the exploration of time and anxiety. Taking into consideration its opening James Baldwin citation, I relate these issues to the novel’s of multidirectional memory of oppression. Tweetable abstract: This article explores how Sasha Marianna Salzmann connects queer subjectivity, multidirectional memory, time and narrative structure.

Introduction: Rethinking “Minor Literatures” – Contemporary Jewish Women’s Writing in Germany and Austria

This introduction sets out the aim of the special collection which is to unmoor German-language Jewish writing from the narrowly defined context of national literatures in which it is often discussed, in an attempt to open it up to discussions around transnational and world literatures. Simultaneously, it suggests that Deleuze’s and Guattari’s framework can benefit immensely from being (re-)applied to its ‘original’, i.e. the Jewish, context, not least by investigating the ways in which it maybe no longer adequately reflects more contemporary concerns. As for the study of the authors and texts that this collection focuses on, the introduction highlights a number of issues which have the potential to innovate discussions around “minor” literatures, German Jewish literatures and the relationship between literature and theory.

Pact with the People?

Pact with the People?

Rethinking Minor Literature and Small Literature as Secondary Zone Literature

The aim of this article is to argue that both “minor literature” and “small literature” should be readdressed as Michel Ragon’s “secondary zone literature” from three perspectives. Firstly, it will be argued that “minor and small literature” began to lose its theoretical capacity with the advent of globalization after the new millennium. Secondly, the problems of “minor literature” and “small literature” will be updated. “Minor literature” mainly has two problems: 1)  The first feature of “minor literature” runs the risk of not only dismissing all literature written by minorities in “minor languages”, but also diminishing the possible meanings of the term, “minority”; and 2) The second and third characteristics of “minor literature” are unable to explain why only non-European arts are perceived to be political and collective. “Small literature” also has two problems: a) it fails to explain why countries that hardly qualify as ‘small’, face problems similar to those of “small literature” in the international literary context; and b) it does not have the capacity to explain the literature of minority and marginal groups within a nation or country. Thirdly, “minor and small literature” will be reconsidered as “secondary zone literature”, not only in an attempt to emphasize cultural dynamics and power relations based on the visibility of various “minor & small” related literary works, but also to demonstrate that literature may be minor or small, but it always has quantitative implications.

Small and Large Cultures: Individuality, the Collective, Conformity and the Period of the Cold War

The Cold War is something I analyze in two parts.  First, I examine its politics, including political literatures and cultures large and small that concentrate on central concerns of the Cold War. Second, I discuss small and minor literatures in the period of the Cold War in theory and practice, including examples from the Netherlands and Canada that are in the period of the Cold War but do not focus on it as its primary concern or theme.  In these sections,  I argue for the centrality of the tension between tyranny and liberty, individual and the group, conformity and nonconformity and related matters. The article ranges in the politics of the Cold War from the background of Marx and Mill though Churchill, Stalin,  Truman, McCarthy to Russell, Grant and Ignatieff.  In literature, that is the Cold War in ink,  the essay analyzes Orwell’s essay on the nuclear bomb and his novels,  Nineteen Eighty-four and Animal Farm as well as  Miller’s play, The Crucible and a poem by Einstein on Russell.  I concentrate on examples of Dutch fiction and their translation into English  and a Canadian novel,  The Weekend Man, by Richard B. Wright,   because they are an element of  “minority literatures.”   Besides  exploring the Cold War, I  briefly examine theories of minor or small literatures, including some aspects of the views of Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari.