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This study focuses on selected texts and authors associated with the cultural centre exil in Vienna which promotes the culture of migrants and minorities, mainly Roma and Sinti, in Austria. Since 1997 exil has awarded the annual prize writing between cultures. The literary prize addresses authors with a migrant background’ whose mother tongue is not German but who write in German. Texts entered for this prize should cover (in the broadest sense) one of the following topics: being foreign, being different, identity, flight, expulsion, arriving, integration or living between cultures. Attached to the centre is the publishing house edition exil. The thesis investigates the negotiation of cultural identities of migrants at the intersection of the cultural centre exil individual life histories and literary creations. Tensions and contradictions between institutional and individual discourses are identified and are related to the literary works of the authors Seher Çakr, Dimitré Dinev, Anna Kim, Grace M. Latigo, Julya Rabinowich, Simone Schönett and Sina Tahayori. My analysis is informed by a theoretical framework which incorporates concepts of cultural identity, canonisation and the construction of community, and combines a cultural sociological approach with a textual one: the analysis focuses on qualitative interviews with selected authors as well as literary texts. I hope to demonstrate the tensions between cultural integration and exclusion and to investigate the place authors around exil negotiate for themselves. The aim of the project is to highlight exil’s as well as the authors’ contribution to the Austrian literary field and to provide a better understanding of their early literary works and their self-conception as writers.

Although the emphasis of this thesis is on the literary representation of female subjectivity in contemporary women's writing in West Germany, the first chapter looks back on the history of women's emancipation in Germany from the early 19th century until today. Selected examples of women's writing will show how women - in their writing and often their lives - attempted to break out of the restrictions which existing male images of women and society as a whole had set up for them. Included in this chapter are the beginnings of women's movements and the struggle for political and social rights. A comparison between those early beginnings and today allows the identification of differences and similarities. The pursuit of the question of how women break out of existing images or how they subvert them in their writing is not only of interest in Chapter I, but is followed up in the whole thesis. This has to lead to another question, namely that of female subjectivity. As women in a patriarchal society are enclosed by a set of images in whose production they did not actively partake, and as the exclusion of women from history perpetuated itself in the absence of women from the history of ideas and from language as the representative of the symbolic order (Lacan), the original question has to be modified to include the assumption that exclusion and absence cannot be overcome by the rational decision to be present. The emphasis in HButungen by Verena Stefan (Chapter II) is therefore on the possibilities of a feminist subject to express subjectivity, focussing also on the relationship between ideology and subjectivity. In Chapter III, which analyses the autobiography by Inga Buhmann Ich habe mir elite Geechlchte geechrleben, the focus is on the conflict between subjectivity and truth, as a self-imposed rule to "confess". Chapter IV is divided into two parts and includes an analysis of the po6tstructuralist theories of subjectivity of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, with emphasis on the role and function of language. The focus of the analysis of Rahschnitt by Ursula Krechel and Altweibereommer? by Pola Veseken (Chapter V) is on the subversion of language and the deconstruction of the unified, coherent subject as the producer of meaning, and the portrayal of female subjectivity as the réintroduction of the imaginary into the symbolic. Through these analyses the question of female subjectivity and the related one as to how women break out of existing images or subvert them in their writing are constantly addressed. The thesis is written in German.

This thesis investigates representations of “Muslim” women and girls in German popular culture 1990-2015. The thesis offers a symptomatic reading of three under-researched genres in the field: life writing, young adult literature and film. The figure of the “Muslim” woman or girl performs a crucial role in far-reaching socio-political debates in Germany. Indeed, such figures challenge the boundaries of “gender equality” and “secularism” and contest notions of “tolerance” and “integration”. The (in)visibility of “Muslim” women’s bodies and their apparent position in “Islam” function as ostensible indicators of their oppression and of “Islam’s” inherent incompatibility with “western” values. This study analyses the discursive function of such figures in German popular culture via three key research questions: what representational practices surround the figure of the “Muslim” woman or girl in German life writing, young adult literature and film? How do such representations function to produce “non-Muslim” subject positions? What is the function of this figure within narratives of feminism and assertions of “gender equality”? This study understands itself as an intervention into contemporary racist discourses in Germany and operates within a transdisciplinary framework of intersectional feminism, cultural and German studies. Ultimately, this thesis aims to make visible and interrogate the underlying hierarchies and agendas that drive representations of “Muslim” women and girls within the discourses studied.

This thesis sets out to examine perceptual structures in works of "Neuer Realismus". In 1965 a group of authors became known both under this name and also under that of "Kölner Schule". Their works were published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne. The publisher's reader in charge of these authors was Dieter Wellershoff who published working notes in the house magazine of Kiepenheuer & Witsch under the title "Neuer Realismus". The fictional work of this group of writers corresponded largely to these notes. In the article Wellershoff made a special plea for phenomenological modes of perception and writing. The critics soon regarded "Neuer Realismus" as a successor to the French Nouveau Roman. It is one of the main aims of this thesis to show what "Neuer Realismus" and the Nouveau Roman have in common and what differentiates them. We should like to examine what similarities each work of the "Neuer Realismus" shows with the Nouveau Roman, how far it follows Vellershoff 's working notes and in what way it remains a work in its own right. We have therefore attempted a predominantly immanent interpretation. The criteria of this thesis are phenomenological modes of perception, particularly with regard to Robbe-Grillet1s "Ecole du regard", the examination of the polarities of subjectivity and objectivity, and the role of the author, and/or the first person narrator, who reflects him and his medium. Because of these criteria there suggested itself the following selection of authors and works, which could be dealt with in an exemplary and meaningful manner within the framework of the thesis: Nicolaus Bom, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Giinter Steffens, Dieter Wellershoff. The thesis deals first with the term "Neuer Realismus" and its contemporary literary context. At the same time it juxtaposes "Neuer Realismus" and Nouveau Roman, considering common aspects as well as divergent ones, and referring in particular to the theoretical writing of Wellershoff and Robbe-Grillet. Then follows a discussion of the individual works vhich are, with the exception of Wellershoffs "Die Schattengrenze", first novels or collections of short stories.

Heiner Müller has often been interpreted as a political writer. This thesis seeks to argue that the profoundly political import of Müller's work can best be understood if one understands Müller as writing about and for a community. This community is heterogeneous, finite, non-totalitarian and transgressive. It is constituted by alterity, thus making its complete realisation impossible. As such, this community can only with the greatest of difficulty be understood in Marxist-Leninist terms, that is, in that ideology under which Müller spent most of his writing life. Müller's later plays, which are far more well-known and more often produced, have often been described as fitting uneasily into the conventional aesthetics of the GDR. This thesis argues that traces of such a non-totalitarian community are to be found in his early work. On the other hand, they bear only limited testimony to the heterogeneous community. The conditions under which he had to write accorded him only restricted means in allowing such a community to come to expression. In addition, Müller himself pulls back from carrying this heterogeneous impulse through to its radical conclusion. It is only when he develops his drama - a development which takes the form of engagement with the dramatic tradition - that he begins to do justice to the notion of community which is present only in nascent form in his early texts. Furthermore, as time goes on, the manner in which Müller wrote and produced texts for the theatre can itself be seen as an expression of this non-totalisable, complex and manifold community. As such, the reasons for the change in Müller's writing can be found in his early work. It is this which the thesis sets out to examine. The expression of community in the manner of Müller's writing might best be explained through the notion of signature. By emphasising the finitude in the relationship between himself and his texts, Müller further radicalises his work. This is primarily achieved through the use of allegory which in turn proves to be a form of writing which engenders remembrance - itself an important constitutive moment in the community. Müller's work, in seeking to express community through its radically finite nature raises a number of questions about the relationship between author, text and the role of literary criticism. The thesis thus attempts to examine these questions and take up the challenge to literary criticism which they represent.

This thesis investigates representations of the Holocaust and the Second World War across a range of German- and Austrian-Jewish writers who belong to the second or third generation born after the Holocaust. These writers relate to the events from the position of the “nonwitness” (Weissman 2004), and in the face of major shifts in Holocaust memory since the millennium: the disappearance of the survivor and eyewitness generation entails a transition from first-hand memories of the war period to an increasingly ritualised cultural memory of the events. This transformation intersects with larger changes in Holocaust memory in the last 15 years, such as the re- and hypermediation of Holocaust memory and the emergence of a globalised Erinnerungskultur. The Holocaust has therefore emerged as a highly discursivised “floating signifier” (Huyssen 2003), which travels transgenerationally, transmedially and transnationally. Engaging with these shifts, I argue that Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” (Hirsch 1997) and recent trauma theory remain embedded in a biologising framework of analysis that views cultural transmission in terms of contagious inheritance. Drawing on cultural and literary theories and transnational memory studies, I develop a new approach that focuses on the Holocaust as a form of “travelling trauma” (Tomsky 2011), tracing its remediation and recycling across geographical, cultural, medial, and representational boundaries. My readings of texts by Benjamin Stein, Maxim Biller, Vladimir Vertlib, and Eva Menasse explore how these authors (re-)negotiate the various travels of Holocaust memory in the age of remediation. By initiating a dialogue between the realms of theory and contemporary fiction, this thesis engages with a broad body of recent German- and Austrian-Jewish Holocaust fiction, while at the same time critically investigating key paradigms in the field of memory and trauma studies.

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate and reconceive the scholarly understanding of one of Óðinn’s aspects – Óðinn as a patron to a mortal hero figure. This theme runs through a number of Old Icelandic and continental Scandinavian texts, but it is most widely represented in the fornaldarsaga genre. To formalise the discussion as well as the choice of material, the concept of the Odinic hero complex was introduced, which encompasses narrative structures, imagery and other material associated in the sagas with a protagonist helped and betrayed by Óðinn. This Odinic hero narrative has been looked at on the example of three fornaldarsǫgur, Vǫlsunga saga, Hrólfs saga kraka and Gautreks saga, as well as learned Latin texts connected to saga literature. The analysis also relied on the evidence of saga narratives that do not explicitly demonstrate the complete Odinic hero complex, but contains significant thematic parallelism to the main sources; these secondary sources included Hálfs saga ok hálfsrekka, Ǫrvar-Odds saga and Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks. The findings support the notion that a number of historians of religion have proposed, that there is a clear structural connection between the Odinic hero paradigm, initiation sequences and the themes of berserkir and shapeshifting. On the other hand, the dissertation shows that this thematic unity is in many cases a younger phenomenon than usually proposed, which leads to the necessity to re-evaluate a number of fornaldarsǫgur as sources on Old Scandinavian mythology and read them from a different perspective.

Thesis Abstract. The purpose of this thesis is to examine Old English and Old Icelandic literary examples of monstrosity from a modern theoretical perspective. I examine the processes of monstrous change by which humans can become identified as monsters, focusing on the role played by social and religious pressures. In the first chapter, I outline the aspects of monster theory and medieval thought relevant to the role of society in shaping identity, and the ways in which anti-societal behaviour is identified with monsters and with monstrous change. Chapter two deals more specifically with Old English and Old Icelandic social and religious beliefs as they relate to human and monstrous identity. I also consider the application of generic monster terms in Old English and Old Icelandic. Chapters three to six offer readings of humans and monsters in Old English and Old Icelandic literary texts in cases where a transformation from human to monster occurs or is blocked. Chapter three focuses on Grendel and Heremod in Beowulf and the ways in which extreme forms of anti-societal behaviour are associated with monsters. In chapter four I discuss the influence of religious beliefs and secular behaviour in the context of the transformation of humans into the undead in the Íslendingasögur. In chapter five I consider outlaws and the extent to which criminality can result in monstrous change. I demonstrate that only in the most extreme instances is any question of an outlaw’s humanity raised. Even then, the degree of sympathy or admiration evoked by such legendary outlaws as Grettir, Gísli and Hörðr means that though they are ambiguous in life, they may be redeemed in death. The final chapter explores the threats to human identity represented by the wilderness, with specific references to Guthlac A, Andreas and Bárðar saga and the impact of Christianity on the identity of humans and monsters. I demonstrate that analysis of the social and religious issues in Old English and Old Icelandic literary sources permits nuanced readings of monsters and monstrosity which in turn enriches understanding of the texts in their entirety.

This thesis examines the representations of houses as physical structures in the Íslendingasögur with specific emphasis on the material aspect of housing culture in the Viking Age and medieval period, as well as the interactions between material culture and text. The Íslendingasögur were written in Iceland as of the thirteenth century, but look back onto the Viking Age (c. 800-1100 AD). Comparison with the archaeology of domestic space reveals that the house in the Íslendingasögur generally corresponds with medieval housing models, contemporary with the period of saga writing. However, there are also examples of structures which correspond to the models of the Viking Age. Descriptions of antiquated buildings are sometimes framed in statements that make explicit reference to the chronological separation between the Viking Age and the writer’s present time, suggesting a familiarity with the evolution of housing culture. Detailed analysis of buildings in the sagas reveals domestic space in its context of use, and demonstrates how the physical nature of the house and farm framed the productive and social activities that went on within. The materiality of domestic life has particular importance for the dispensing of hospitality. Demonstrations of domestic space in use also allow for a better understanding of the relationship between objects and language, and elucidate some difficulties in translation and academic usage both in archaeology and literary studies. Material culture can itself influence the processes of composition in oral/written narratives such as the sagas, by inspiring the formation of narrative episodes. The built environment can also provide a contextual framing for narratives, acting as a mnemonic device facilitating the preservation and transmission of saga narratives.