Özdamar's Autobiographical Fictions: Trans-National Identity and Literary Form
Emine Sevgi Ozdamar's novels Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei · hat zwei Turen · aus einer kam ich rein · aus der anderen ging ich raus (1992) and Die Brucke vom Goldenen Horn (1998), are formally hybrid: as fictional autobiographies they mix invention and history; as first-person narrations they produce the divided figure of the narrator/protagonist; in mixing German with transliterated Turkish or Turkish-German patois and fragments of many other languages they are linguistically hybrid. In conveying a complex sense of transformative interchange between culturally heterogeneous countries under the impact of social and political change, both novels combat fixed national or cultural stereotypes. The first novel pervasively mixes social and magical realism in evoking tensions within Turkey between tradition and modernisation, whereas the second novel more sharply juxtaposes a fleeting magical-realist utopian vision with a mildly satirised picture of student protest in Berlin and a much grimmer account of unresolved ethnic conflict and political turmoil in Turkey.
Dissolving Linguistic Borders? Contemporary Multilingual Literature in German-speaking Countries
system better (Romaine 112). Multilingualism enhances “metalinguistic skills,” 40 Multilingual participants in an eye tracking study hear words in one language, while seeing objects that share initial phonetic features of the other language. For example, Russian-English bilinguals hear the English word “marker” while seeing a “marka” (Russian stamp) among multiple other objects. The participants look at the “interlingual distractor” significantly more often than at other objects that do not share phonetic features with the audio input. Thus, “bilingual listeners do not appear to be able to deactivate the irrelevant mental lexicon when in a monolingual situation... spoken language automatically activates both mental lexicons in parallel” (Spivey et al. 283).
Carnival of Shame: Doctorow and the Rosenbergs
“Literature can turn language, for the moment at least, against the sentence of death.” Considering the national and international furor provoked by the sensational early 1950's “atom spy” trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, one may be surprised that these dramatic and traumatic events have not inspired more literary artistry than they have. But a prominent playwright, Arthur Miller, did write The Crucible (produced in 1953) in part as a response to the rabid McCarthyism of that era, and two highly regarded novelists in a later decade composed ambitious novels drawing directly on the Rosenberg affair: E. L. Doctorow in The Book of Daniel (1971) and Robert Coover in The Public Burning (1977). In 1987, Sidney Lumet produced the little noticed film Daniel, based on Doctorow's novel, and still more recently Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Angels in America, with Ethel Rosenberg as one of the characters, has been playing on Broadway.