The modern fantastic in German Democratic Republic short prose
Leighton, Hera Tzortzopoulou
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/21282
Description
Title
The modern fantastic in German Democratic Republic short prose
Author(s)
Leighton, Hera Tzortzopoulou
Issue Date
1990
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
McGlathery, James M.
Department of Study
Germanic Languages and Literatures
Discipline
Germanic Languages and Literatures
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Literature, Germanic
Language
eng
Abstract
During the decade of the 1970s, a new kind of realism developed in the literature of the German Democratic Republic as a movement away from the Socialist Realism of the past. Paradoxically this new realism also encompassed the fantastic. Although long novels written in the Modern GDR Fantastic caught the attention of scholars and critics, the short prose form in which this fantastic manifested itself most effectively and uniquely has been relatively neglected. In my dissertation I examine the latter phenomenon through ten representative short stories by contemporary GDR authors. All the authors use fantastic elements together with realistic descriptions of everyday life, not in order to escape from reality but rather to penetrate deeper into it. Structurally, the fantastic is achieved by crossing natural borders of time, space, sex, species, and other physical facts. These trespasses are then used as metaphors to comment on the special reality of the GDR. The stories which have been divided into three main types--Dream Fantasies, Satiric Fantasies and Grotesque Fantasies--correspond to a great degree to Kathryn Hume's schema of literature of vision, revision, and disillusion. They all want to disturb the reader and force him to think for himself. This is a fantastic of engagement which reveals a great deal about themes such as the relationship of the individual to society, the division of Germany, and the status of women in a socialist state. Although these themes have been treated elsewhere in GDR literature in the mimetic mode, they emerge here with greater clarity and force through the estrangement of the fantastic. They also confirm once more the crucial connection between literature and the society from which it springs.
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