Contenu du sommaire : La prose allemande contemporaine

Referring to the significance of the unreliable narrator in fictional texts and to the related discussion in terms of narratological schemes, this article seeks to analyze the function of the female narrator in the novel of Felicitas Hoppe entitled Johanna. It argues that Felicitas Hoppe creates an Unreliable Narrator to emphasize her skeptical attitude towards the narration, involving both style and subject matter.

Christian Kracht's Imperium, published in 2012, has caused a controversy. It is a hybrid of fictional metabiography, adventure novel and historiographical metafiction, incorporating a postcolonial perspective. As such, it requires a critical readership attentively following the author's postmodern, ironical use of various discourses. Kracht sketches out the origins of national socialist horrors by establishing parallels between Germany and a fictitious society based in the South Seas. The story of Engelhardt, a dropout, serves as a pretext to that end, as is made obvious by omnipresent references to colonialism, antisemitism and insanity. Thus, the novel can be understood as a critical historiographical reflection that subverts binary oppositions and subtly deconstructs colonial discourses. The old myth of an idyllic German South Sea is debunked by the narrativization of Engelhardt's life and totalitarian “Order of the Sun”-movement.

?Peter Kurzeck, who died in 2013, is often regarded as a past-oriented writer. However, even though his work tries to revive origins that men may have left behind too quickly, it also reflects in a very perceptive way the reality of the late modern age. Kurzeck shows again and again how the acceleration phenomena of self-overtaking modernity have altered the entire sociocultural fabric: they have affected the material constitution of the outside world and its public space – which has been turned into non-places – the perception of time itself, transgenerational relationships and, eventually, human identity. This paper aims to show how these transformations concerning time and space affect individual and collective memory and how they are reflected in a “memory literature”. On the occasion of the translation into French of Mein Bahnhofsviertel (Un été sans fin, 2013), this paper tries to assess this still little known author's view of today's world.?

?While immersing the reader in a condensed 24-hour slice of present in the life of the very ordinary Charly Renn in turn-of-the-century Hamburg, Michael Kleeberg offers a kaleidoscopic, multiperspectivist vision of the 1990s which leads to a panorama of the 20th century from the traces of the First World War to the ashes of 9/11. In Vaterjahre, the individual and the collective are engaged in a dialectic relation, between private life and History, daily routine and disruptive events, which constitutes a renewal of the aesthetic codes of writing the present. By pushing the boundaries of narrative experiments, Vaterjahre manufactures an enriched present which includes both past and future dimensions.?

?The financial crisis of 2007, more than any other phenomenon of the recent past, symbolizes uncertainty, fear of the personal (and financial) future, as well as a severe distrust of politics and of the economy in general. Less than ten years after the establishment of a common monetary union, Europe slipped into its most dramatic financial crisis. In contemporary German literature, these fears and the risky money game that has been made ?responsible for the global crisis, are repeatedly discussed and addressed through the character of the speculator. This typical male character regularly features in literary works as a symbol of capitalism. He may be made to reflect either his own actions, or to illustrate the nature and risks of the system itself. After a brief historical overview, this article analyses exemplary speculators in recent German prose, including works by Jonas Lüscher, Daniel Kehlmann, Sascha Reh and Kathrin Röggla.?

The postmodern society of the new millennium seems more than ever to be on the edge of its own destruction: 9/11, climatic disasters, economic crises, individual existential fears and other unpleasant events are now inscribed on our cultural memory. In the past few years, these dramatic experiences have inspired contemporary German writers. While Sibylle Berg's Ende gut (2004) depicts today's society and its doomsday mood, the apocalypse has already begun in Thomas Glavinic's Die Arbeit der Nacht (2006). In this novel, the protagonist both has to compensate for the disappearance of the world population while at the same time fighting against his other self. For her part, Kathrin Röggla addresses the omnipresent fear of catastrophes in her essayistic writing. These exemplarily works depict the zeitgeist of the early 21st century and evoke the atmosphere of a generation in search of identity, caught between anxiety about the future and the joy of destruction.

Authors of contemporary German literature are linking (self-) alienation phenomena with new challenges in the labor sector. Where the field of business is of no moral value or does not meet personal skills, it leads to depersonalization and derealisation disorders. And the often-cited “true self” heading for self-realization remains on the track. But the pressure to perform and the urge to self-tuning also create forms of perception that lead the protagonists to burn-out-like conditions, new forms of alienation. Terms such as anxiety, nausea, indifference, keywords of existential literature, can also be found in Thomas Melles Sickster (2011), which raises the question about the “novelty” of forms of alienation and their literary representation. This contribution is devoted to the intensive analysis of three contemporary German novels (Melle, Genazino, Von Steinaecker) linked by the underlying topic, the contemporary labour world, where alienation unfolds.

?The article deals with two novels, Strom by Hannah Dübgen and Wenn das Land still ist by Carsten Kluth (both published in 2013). It examines how they describe today's world (a globalized world characterized by exchange at all levels) and questions in particular the consequences of contemporary patterns of living on social relations (The dialectic between proximity and distance) and values (family, nature, national tradition). It also approaches the question of the narrative choices made by the authors in order to examine the place of the subject or the relation to space and time in today's world.?

?The present article is based on three novels: Björn Kern?: Die Erlöser AG (2007), Barbara Bronnen : Liebe bis in den Tod (2008) and Arno Geiger : Der alte König in seinem Exil (2011). They share a common preoccupation with that stage in life when elderly people have to face illness and pain. All three also raise the crucial issue of how one should behave when confronted to an incurable disease, unbearable pain and the loss of autonomy. They focus on one of the key experiences of the present generation of senior citizens at the beginning of the third millenium. The background of these novels bears all the marks of postmodernity: old age, sickness and death are left in the care of individual responsibility. The three stories show from different perspectives how difficult it is to provide satisfactory answers to the crucial questions of the end of life; they suggest unexpected ways of constructing meaning in the postmodern age. This article focuses on the way the discourse about the end of life is built and on the creation of narratives about this question. The analysis of narrative strategies seeks to highlight the dominant values of the postmodern society and the risks involved. It also calls attention to the place that is assigned to the individual and the meaning of life that can result from it. It identifies the norms, values, hopes, obsessions and anxieties regarding the issue of the end of life.?

?Focusing on Christian Krachts' novel Faserland and on his travel writing, the paper examines the travelling subject as a reflection on melancholy cosmopolitism. In this respect, Krachts' criticism of Germany is interpreted as a criticism of failed westernization. By contrast, his analysis suggests a positive view of the Allied occupation of Germany and of the Asian countries that have recently adopted the capitalist model.?

?The novels entitled Die Arbeit der Nacht, Das Leben der Wünsche and Das größere Wunder by Austrian writer Thomas Glavinic (*1972) deal with the life and love story of the narrator, Jonas. They tackle the same questions but their plots loosely connected. This article argues that time and the perception of time are very important. The narrator is going through ordeals and he ponders the possibility of controlling the passing of time either through mediality or human perception. Capturing the instant becomes an epiphany. In these novels, moments in time are connected with the metathemes of happiness and love, which can only be experienced at a given moment. So Glavinic's novels can be read as a plea for paying attention to the value of instants of time.?

Through the study of Daniel Glattauer's novel Gut gegen Nordwind (Love virtually, 2008) and Daniel Kehlmann's short story Ein Beitrag zur Debatte (A contribution to the debate, 2008), this paper seeks to analyse the way literature deals with the Internet and the social changes it induces. Gut gegen Nordwind narrates the e-mail relationship between Emmi and Leo, who fall in love without having ever met each other. This e-mail novel shows some similarities with the genre of the epistolary novel, but also distances itself from it. Thanks to performative writing, the protagonists create for themselves identities that are derive from the electronic dialogue but stand in sharp contrast with the identity they assume in the real world. The virtual is thus a heterotopy, whose borders the characters adamantly defend, since crossing them would mean the end of the love story. Ein Beitrag zur Debatte, a short story from the anthology Fame, imitates in a convincing way another form of virtual communication: the forum post. The narrator is here characterised as a geek who is addicted to virtual forums. Although fully correct from a technical point of view, the narrator's report is undermined by its stylistic properties, its loss of touch with reality, and its disconnection from the other stories of the collection. The short story is thus a caricature of the geek as well as a parody of a forum post, which demonstrates the inefficiency of this medium. The differences between the two approaches must be underlined. Whereas Kehlmann's short story provides a pessimistic view of the Internet Glattauer's novel offers a more nuanced understanding of the latter… However, these two texts, like many contemporary German publications, react to the same paradigm shift, i.e. the necessity of dealing simultaneously with several real and virtual worlds which bespeak the digitalisation of our society. In so doing, these books consider literature to be competent to assess this change.

This article allows readers to catch a glimpse of popular German women's literature that takes us from sentimental novels to taboo free sex stories in which heart beats are eventually synchronised with one's carnal desires. The publication of Charlotte Roche's provocative and immodest Feuchtgebiete, has announced the emergence of women's erotic literature from 2008. Modesty and decency have disappeared and the story plunges to new depths of coarseness and trash. This novel provided inspiration for a new generation of female authors who use slang to talk about feelings and sex. Sentimental love stories which were produced by previous generations are now replaced by essentially sadomasochistic erotic novels, guaranteeing commercial success for a large number of publishers. These new popular novels aimed at women, highly gendered and full of sexual stereotypes, feed current thinking around post-feminism.

Science fiction has been a popular trend in film and television in recent years, a genre often met with suspicions of triviality. However, more and more renowned writers / authors dare to write science fiction. Reinhard Jirgl's novel Nichts von Euch auf Erden and Die Zukunft of Mars by Georg Klein (both published in 2013) raise the question of the situation of mankind on Earth and Mars several centuries from now. This article aims to show how these representations of the future provide a detailed analysis of our time. The characters in both novels look into the often problematic cultural practices of the 20th and 21st century. Thus present day readers face a distorted representation of their own time. Yet this alienated representation also offers the possibility to introduce comical or enigmatic elements as well as new perspectives on what seems familiar. Klein and Jirgl see humanity threatened by self-inflicted natural disasters, terrorism, poverty and the radical mechanization of daily life. These two novels are very different but their authors choose the book as a medium to bring salvation. Both texts imply that imagination, literature and storytelling can be considered the only constant feature to have survived the passing of time.