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.
Continental Drifters: Holocaust Memory, Decolonization, and Postwar Migration to Europe
Continental Drifters: Holocaust Memory, Decolonization, and Postwar Migration to Europe
Essential Imaginings: the Novels of Angela Carter and Russell Hoban
‘Magic realism’ is a term which has rapidly entered the literary-critical vocabulary and, as is customary in such cases, it is difficult to define and shows a tendency to spread. It is associated with the work of, for example, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie and, although Rushdie is British, carries a Third-World connotation; it is also, however, used of the works of European writers like Italo Calvino, and here the implications seem rather different, more to do with the forging of crystalline legend and myth. One of its more significant characteristics is the tendency to depict ‘magical’, boundary-breaking events as part of the texture of everyday experience, whether it be Marquez’s insistence on generational reincarnation or Calvino’s casual assertions of the contemporaneity of past history.