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.
The poetics of return: imagining home in German transnational narratives
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The Poet, The Critic, and the Moralist: Horace, Epistles 1.19
I begin by quoting from two valuable recent works on Horace. Professor Brink in his Horace on Poetry (1964) writes: ‘The centre of the short piece lies in lines 21—34. Readers, among them critics and poets, had denied one aspect of the Odes which was surely above criticism—the striking originality of these poems. Horace's defence turns on the question of originality’ (p. 180) and ‘Epistle 19 is unique in that it alone among the literary satires and letters reiterates Horace's claim to be the Latin fidicen’ (p. 182). And Dr. McGann in his Studies in Horace's First Book of Epistles (Collection Latomus 100: 1969): ‘In Ep. 19... as in the literary satires, Horace is a practising poet or at least a very recently practising one, engaged in defending himself against hostile criticism’ (p. 40) and ‘As the only epistle concerned exclusively with literary matters, the nineteenth stands apart’ (p. 82).