Bibliography: pages 201-210. / The dissertation attempts to analyse the novella Die Reisebegegnung by Anna Seghers not as an isolated "work" by an isolated "author" but as a symptom of the possibilities and limits of innovative writing in the German Democratic Republic in the seventies. While it therefore situates the novella within the context of literary politics, it also tries to show how Anna Seghers expanded the boundaries of literary political debates, which focused on the concepts of cultural heritage and social realism, by using the form of fiction instead of a critical essay. The first chapter deals with the historical context of the novella. It tries to show Anna Seghers' allegorical depiction of the literary figures of "Nikolai Gogol", "E. T. A. Hoffmann" and "Franz Kafka" as representations of the aesthetics of realism, romanticism and modernism respectively. The use of allegory marks a significant breakaway from the method of social realism. The chapter also tries to show the intertextuality of the novella. The second chapter focuses on the debate on cultural heritage in the GDR. It retraces Anna Seghers' changing attitudes to the controversial cultural heritage of romanticism and modernism in the Marxist debate on realism from the thirties up to the publication of the novella Die Reisebegegn.ung in 1973. The third chapter deals with the theory of socialist realism as developed by Georg Lukacs and simplified by the Stalinist cultural functionary Andrei Zhdanov. It attempts to define the position taken by Anna Seghers in the Marxist debate on realism in which she argued on the same side as Ernst Bloch and Bertolt Brecht against the concept of realism upheld by Lukacs. The fourth chapter deals with the depiction of the three literary figures in the novella. It attempts to show in how far this figuration deviates from the orthodox Marxist reception of the three authors on the one hand and from that of alternative Marxist and non-Marxist interpretations on the other. The fifth chapter analyses Anna Seghers' literary representation of time. She lets the three authors travel freely through "objective" historical time, which constitutes the most significant deviation from the theory of socialist realism in the novella. The chapter discusses the implications this has for innovative writing in the GDR. While Anna Seghers tries to incorporate the divergent concepts of realism of the three authors - each situated within his own literary historical framework - into her variety of socialist realism in the GDR in the seventies, she adapts and changes the complexity and specificity of their representations of reality. The unresolved contradictions of the novella, however, constantly subvert the claim to an extraliterary reality, which the literary figures and the novella make. The limits of this novella in its literary historical context were in turn expanded by writers in the GDR in the seventies who saw in it a legitimisation for their own literary experiments.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uct/oai:localhost:11427/22124 |
| Date | January 1990 |
| Creators | Horn, Anette |
| Contributors | Pakendorf, Gunther |
| Publisher | University of Cape Town, Faculty of Humanities, German Language and Literature |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | deu |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Master Thesis, Masters, MA |
| Format | application/pdf |
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