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Kai Wiegandt

Barenboim-Said Academy in Berlin, Literature, Faculty Member

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Caspar Battegay

University of Basel

Katharina Heyden

University of Berne

Heinz-Juergen Loth

Burglind Jungmann

University of California, Los Angeles

Sophia University

Vinzenz Hediger

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

Gaioz Tsutsunashvili

Wuhan University

Hannes B. Mosler

Universität Duisburg-Essen

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Books by Kai Wiegandt

J. M. Coetzee’s Revisions of the Human: Posthumanism and Narrative Form

Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

This study argues that the most consistent concern in Coetzee’s oeuvre is the question of what ma... more This study argues that the most consistent concern in Coetzee’s oeuvre is the question of what makes us human. Ideas of the human that stress language-use, reason, self-consciousness, autonomy and God-likeness are revised in his novels via a ‘poetic of testing’ which pits intertextually-referenced ideas against each other in polyphonic narratives. The study goes on to purport that without acknowledging Coetzee’s revisions of the human, other concerns in his novels such as ethics, the status of the animal, or racial politics cannot be fully understood. In addition to examining the philosophical provenance of questions of the human in the work of such thinkers as Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, Barthes and Foucault, the study charts Coetzee’s reconfiguration of elements drawn from major literary precursors like Cervantes, Heinrich von Kleist, Kafka and Beckett. Its leading argument is that Coetzee revises the Enlightenment idea of the human as a disengaged, autonomous thinker by demonstrating the limitations of reason; that he instead offers a view of humanity as engaged agency, a view most compatible with ideas developed in the discourse of posthumanism, theories of materiality and social practice theory; and that his revisions depend on narrative form as much as they recommend a narrative approach to ideas in general.

Crowd and Rumour in Shakespeare

Ashgate, 2012

In this study, the author offers new interpretations of Shakespeare's works in the context of two... more In this study, the author offers new interpretations of Shakespeare's works in the context of two major contemporary notions of collectivity: the crowd and rumour. The plays illustrate that rumour and crowd are mutually dependent; they also betray a fascination with the fact that crowd and rumour make individuality disappear. Shakespeare dramatizes these mechanisms, relating the crowd to class conflict, to rhetoric, to the theatre and to the organization of the state; and linking rumour to fear, to fame and to philosophical doubt. Paying attention to all levels of collectivity, Wiegandt emphasizes the close relationship between the crowd onstage and the Elizabethan audience. He argues that there was a significant - and sometimes precarious - metatheatrical blurring between the crowd on the stage and the crowd around the stage in performances of crowd scenes. The book's focus on crowd and rumour provides fresh insights on the central problems of some of Shakespeare's most contentiously debated plays, and offers an alternative to the dominant tradition of celebrating Shakespeare as the origin of modern individualism.

The Transnational in Literary Studies: Potential and Limitations of a Concept

Ed. Kai Wiegandt. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2020

This volume clarifies the meanings and applications of the concept of the transnational in litera... more This volume clarifies the meanings and applications of the concept of the transnational in literary studies and identifi es areas in which the concept can be particularly useful. Its contributors present case studies in which the concept replaces or complements dominant concepts in literary studies, assess the advantages and limitations of writing literary history with a transnational focus, and identify transnational genres.

Gegessen? Essen und Erinnerung in den Literaturen der Welt (ed. with Caspar Battegay, Lena Henningsen)

Neofelis, 2019

Gerichte, Essenspraktiken, zugeschriebene Bedeutungen sowie mit konkreten Gerichten verbundene As... more Gerichte, Essenspraktiken, zugeschriebene Bedeutungen sowie mit konkreten Gerichten verbundene Assoziationen und Erinnerungen unterscheiden sich je nach Kultur, gesellschaftlichen Verhältnissen und individuellen Dispositionen. Entsprechend sind Schilderungen von Essen und Praktiken des Essens besonders wirkmächtige literarische Werkzeuge, lassen sich so doch lebendige Bilder, Emotionen, Erinnerungen, Geschmäcker und Gerüche in den Leser*innen wachrufen.

Besonders häufig hat das Essen in der Literatur die Funktion eines Auslösers von Erinnerungen: Speisen werden zum verbindenden Element zwischen Gegenwart und Vergangenheit, Körper und Geist, sinnlicher Wahrnehmung und erinnertem Leben. Prousts ‚Madeleine-Episode‘ in Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit ist nur eines von vielen Beispielen. Die Beiträge in Gegessen? befragen Texte der Weltliteratur aus den letzten zwei Jahrtausenden nach den Praktiken des Essens, den Bedeutungszuschreibungen von Speisen und dem Zusammenhang zwischen Essen und Erinnerung.

The Return of the Historical Novel? Thinking About Fiction and History After Historiographic Metafiction (ed. with Andrew James Johnston)

Winter, 2017

Until recently, the critical reception of historical fiction was dominated by two theoretical par... more Until recently, the critical reception of historical fiction was dominated by two theoretical paradigms: György Lukács’s Marxist view and Linda Hutcheon’s concept of ‘historiographic metafiction’. We are now entering a new phase as the discussion of the historical novel is rapidly becoming more inclusive, more tolerant and, above all, more diverse. It is before the backdrop of these changes in the critical debate that the contributions to this volume are meant to be read. Rather than seeing historical fiction as locked in a clear-cut scheme of teleological succession or assigning to the historical novel specific aesthetic purposes, the articles in this collection seek to probe deeply into the historical novelʼs potential for providing readers not simply with an understanding of how the image of the past is constructed but also of how attempts to chart forms of historical otherness constitute a specific mode of cultural experience mediated by literature.

This desire for a literary experience of historical otherness has recently increased in urgency, even if the historical authenticity one might nostalgically associate with such a project must always elude us. Authors discussed include Walter Scott, John Fowles, Graham Swift, M. J. Vassanji, J. M. Coetzee, Peter Ackroyd, Alan Massie, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Hilary Mantel and Jim Crace.

J. M. Coetzee and the Non-English Literary Traditions (Special Issue ed. with Maria-Jesús Lopez)

European Journal of English Studies 20:2, 2016

Empathy and Understanding Others (Special Issue ed. with Miriam Akkermann, Ulrike Endesfelder, Philipp Kanske

by Kai Wiegandt and Miriam Akkermann

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 43:2, 2018

Trieb: Poetiken und Politiken einer modernen Letztbegründung (ed. with Jan Niklas Howe)

Kadmos, 2014

Mit Beiträgen von Rupert Gaderer, Mario Grizelj, Jan Niklas Howe, Burkhard Liebsch, Bastian Ronge... more Mit Beiträgen von Rupert Gaderer, Mario Grizelj, Jan Niklas Howe, Burkhard Liebsch, Bastian Ronge, Veronika Thanner, Johannes Türk, Joseph Vogl, Jan Völker, Kai Wiegandt.

»Triebe« werden seit dem 18. Jahrhundert als Erklärungsmuster für das Natürliche und Normale, das Widernatürliche und Anormale, das Unbewusste und Unkontrollierte herangezogen. Sehr unterschiedliche Triebe erklären von der Entstehung des Lebens bis zu pathologischem Sozialverhalten eine gewaltige Bandbreite von Phänomenen: Nebeneinander stehen u.a. Bildungstrieb, Ernährungstrieb, Sexualtrieb, Zerstörungstrieb, Aufklärungstrieb, Mordtrieb, moralischer Trieb, ökonomischer Trieb. Was eigentlich ein Trieb ist, bleibt in den meisten historischen Bestimmungen unklar. Triebe werden mal als unsichtbares organisches Substrat deklariert, mal freimütig als heuristische Fiktion und im 20. Jahrhundert sogar als Mythologeme. Gemeinsam ist diesen Konzeptionen die Ausgangsidee einer doppelten Unhintergehbarkeit: Triebe werden in lebenspraktischer Hinsicht konzipiert als übermächtige und für das Triebsubjekt unkontrollierbare Instanzen, in epistemologischer Hinsicht als nicht weiter hinterfragbare, axiomatische Setzungen. Die Beiträge untersuchen aus philosophischer, wissensgeschichtlicher, literatur- und kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive, wie in der Moderne die Fremdbestimmung menschlichen Lebens durch sich selbst im Triebbegriff gefasst wird und welche politischen Kräfte in diesen Entwürfen wirksam sind.

Papers by Kai Wiegandt

Class Divides and Poverty in the Postcolonial Graphic Novel: A Reading of Sarnath Banerjee’s The Harappa Files (2011)

Un-Mapping the Global South. Ed. Gero Bauer, Nicole Hirschfelder, Fernando Resende. New York: Routledge, 2024

Following the present volume’s aim of ‘un-mapping’ the Global South by eschewing geographical loc... more Following the present volume’s aim of ‘un-mapping’ the Global South by eschewing geographical location in the Southern hemisphere as its defining feature, my chapter seeks to contribute to making the ‘Global South’ productive as a category of knowledge by identifying ‘Southern’ ways of seeing – and making them visible – in the contemporary graphic novel. Specifically, I will analyse the graphic novel The Harappa Files (2011) by Indian graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee and its aesthetic strategies of conveying to the reader a visceral sense of poverty and class divisions in the Indian metropolis. Instead of joining the debate about the proper definition of the Global South, my contribution thus emphasises concrete experiences and accounts of (post-)colonial dislocation and disenfranchisement, and how these experiences inform ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams) in the Global South. I show that The Harappa Files represents class divisions and poverty in post-liberation metropolitan India as part of an ongoing, though informal, economic imperialism inflicted upon and taking place in the Global South. Further, I demonstrate how Banerjee uses both ancient and urban myths from India to grapple with poverty and class divides, and how he taps the graphic novel’s semiotic potential to engage the reader’s imagination in ways unavailable to the solely text-based novel.

Introduction: Genres, Poetics and Subjectivities of Migration

Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2023

If it is true that no person ever experienced exactly the same as another, it is also true that n... more If it is true that no person ever experienced exactly the same as another, it is also true that no person ever experienced something that did not resemble someone else’s experience. Speaking of genres of migration literature is to acknowledge that experiences of migration resemble each other. Speaking of distinct poetics informing specific genres of migration literature acknowledges that evocations of different shared migratory experiences each tend to be represented by specific topoi and literary means. Different periods have given rise to different similarities and produced specific subgenres and poetics of migration literature. This is, in a nutshell, the reason why the contributors to this issue came together at the conference “Subjectivities of Migration: Poetics and Genre in the Literary Imagination of Migrant Experience since 1989” at the Barenboim-Said Akademie Berlin in September 2021. The present issue of Interventions presents selected papers from the conference in substantially revised and extended form.

Fiction’s Gothic Imagination of Reverse Domination: Western Migrants in Saudi Arabia (Hilary Mantel, Dave Eggers)

Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2023

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reverse colonization narratives, subsumed under the ... more Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reverse colonization narratives, subsumed under the rubric “imperial gothic” by Patrick Brantlinger, featured invasions from the colonial periphery to the imperial centre. This essay argues that recent decades have seen the emergence of similar “reverse domination narratives”. The narratives feature the migration of professionals from the Global North to the new economic centres in the Global South, where the migrants occupy subservient positions. As in the case of nineteenth-century reverse colonization narratives, gothic elements underpin the reversal of domination. In this essay I read two instances of these narratives – Hilary Mantel’s Eight Months on Ghazzah Street and Dave Eggers’s A Hologram for the King – as symptoms of Northern anxiety at losing economic, political, and cultural influence to regions perceived as threats to global supremacy.

Western Migrants in Hong Kong: Neo-Imperial Gothic and the Literary Imagination of Reverse Domination (Paul Theroux, Lawrence Osborne)

Configurations of Migration: Knowledges – Imaginaries – Media. Ed. Jennifer Leetsch, Frederike Middelhoff, Miriam Wallraven. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023

Shakespeare in and on Exile: Politicized Reading and Performative Writing in the Robben Island Shakespeare

Global Shakespeare and Social Injustice: Towards a Transformative Encounter. Ed. Chris Thurman, Sandra Young. London: Arden, 2023

Precarious Lives: Near-Death and Survival in Coetzee's Fiction

Journal of Modern Literature, 2023

Featuring numerous moments of close survival, J.M. Coetzee's novels display a double concern with... more Featuring numerous moments of close survival, J.M. Coetzee's novels display a double concern with precarity—the economic, social and political uncertainties suffered by disenfranchised and marginalized characters—and with the precariousness of life, i.e. the vulnerability and fragility of the body. The significance of the moments of close survival consists in the tension between the religious sense of the precarious as that which is undeservedly given and can be revoked at any time, and the purely man-made, political nature of precarity. Barely surviving, the privileged survivors of Coetzee's fictions are reminded that they owe not only their life to luck but also their privilege of being shielded from most threats to life.

Narrative as Realistic Thinking

Realism: Aesthetics, Experiments, Politics. Ed Jens Elze. New York: Bloomsbury, 2022

What is the benefit of embedding ideas in narratives? This chapter proposes that a specific answe... more What is the benefit of embedding ideas in narratives? This chapter proposes that a specific answer to this question-because it allows the reader to think them realistically-can be found in contemporary literature. To present ideas realistically, contemporary works suggest, means presenting them in the conditions which allow them to exist in the first place: embodied by someone and embedded in history and culture. The chapter consists of two parts. In the first part, I outline the realism proposed in J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (2003). 1 "Realism" does not refer here to a period in literary history nor to a mode of narrative that attempts to stay close to the facts of a historical time and place. Realism is Coetzee's term for an attitude toward ontology and epistemology that considers ideas inseparable from the things or people that embody them and from the situations in which these things or people are embedded. Realism is characteristic of narrative, but not of philosophical or scientific discourse, insofar as only narrative, by conveying the qualia of experience, allows the reader to think ideas in these conditions. In the second part, I read Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy (2014-18) as an engagement with this notion of narrative realism. Like Elizabeth Costello, the trilogy sometimes breaks with realism as a conventional mode of evoking reality, but at the same time affirms realism as the ability of narrative to present ideas realistically. In contrast to Elizabeth Costello, however, Cusk's trilogy suggests that our ideas (including our idea of self) are culturally shared rather than unique to each of us because our thinking is inflected by similar historical-cultural coordinates.

Imagining Disaster in the British Arts before the Grenfell Tower Fire: the Case of Ben Wheatley's "High-Rise" (2015)

Journal for the Study of British Cultures, 2021

In the popular arts, a general unease with the housing situation in London had articulated itself... more In the popular arts, a general unease with the housing situation in London had articulated itself long before the Grenfell Tower fire. Yet although the British arts had explored London’s housing crisis in manifold guises, most commentators from the middle-class majority said they had held a fire such as the one in Grenfell Tower unthinkable. In this article, I focus on a cinematic fiction released only a year before Grenfell that might shed some light on this apparent paradox: Ben Wheatley’s film High-Rise, made in 2015, based on J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel of the same name. The film illustrates, on the one hand, the arts’ unique strategies of imagining issues such as deregulation, privatization and gentrification. On the other hand, it illustrates the risk of repeating on the level of representation what deregulation, privatization and gentrification do on the ground: making specific segments of society disappear. I argue that, through constructing parallels with London’s contemporary high-rises and with developments in London’s housing market, the film invites reading the high-rise as a metaphor for London’s housing market, but in fact only sheds light on the effects of the crisis on London’s middle class. Nostalgia for council housing affordable for all replaces the working class who actually live there – a blind spot that was symptomatic of the British cultural imaginary before Grenfell.

Shakespeare and the Present: History and Mediality in Richard III

Shakespeare, 2020

In Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power Stephen Greenblatt employs a presentist mode of reading when he h... more In Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power Stephen Greenblatt employs a presentist mode of reading when he highlights how certain aspects of the play resonate with the current US presidency. The book rekindled debates about historicist versus presentist modes of reading Shakespeare. Neither Greenblatt nor his critics noted, however, that at the very centre of Richard III – the central play in Tyrant – Shakespeare inserted a dialogue on the very questions of whether historical documents give later generations access to the past, and how these documents should be interpreted. In this article I demonstrate that Richard III develops an idea of history that speaks to the question of historicism versus presentism by pointing towards the mediality of historical knowledge. I argue that, considered from a presentist perspective, the play’s reflections on orality and literacy in a culture turning from an oral to a literate culture speak more specifically to our political present than does Greenblatt’s character criticism of Richard.

New Paradigm or Another Trope of Resistance? A Response to 'The Global South and Literature'

Kairos, 2020

Introduction: The Concept of the Transnational in Literary Studies

The Transnational in Literary Studies: Potential and Limitations of a Concept. Ed. Kai Wiegandt. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2020

Transnational Migrant Fiction as World Literature: Identity, Translatability and the Global Book Market

The Transnational in Literary Studies: Potential and Limitations of a Concept. Ed. Kai Wiegandt. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter , 2020

In recent decades, a new literary genre written mainly by authors from the Global South living in... more In recent decades, a new literary genre written mainly by authors from the Global South living in North America and Europe has emerged. Mostly written in English, but also in French, German, and other languages, the (graphic) novels and stories of the genre describe the formation of migrant identities that do not primarily rely on nationalityneither on the original nationality nor on that affiliated with the destination country. Instead, these identities are formed by a variety of almost equal factors such as the birthplace of one's parents, one's place of residence, work, language, education, lifestyle, and culture. In this transnational migration fiction, the creation of identity resembles a collage of cultural elements from both the home and target cultures, between which the authors often oscillate. Discussing Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, and Taiye Selasi's Ghana Must Go, this chapter demonstrates how the modelling of identity in transnational migrant fiction is related to the function of the genre in the global book market: transnational migrant fiction is read around the world because it provides insights into foreign cultures, which makes it a particular kind of world literature as defined by David Damrosch. The genre's success is partly due to the way that it meets Western readers' sensibilities halfway. It suggests a continuity between the world of the Western reader with the foreign culture. Thematically, this continuity is suggested by conflicts that exist across national borders, such as social inequality and discrimination based on ethnicity and gender. This creates the impression of a general human situation, the local characteristics of which remain translatable.

J. M. Coetzee’s Revisions of the Human: Posthumanism and Narrative Form

Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

This study argues that the most consistent concern in Coetzee’s oeuvre is the question of what ma... more This study argues that the most consistent concern in Coetzee’s oeuvre is the question of what makes us human. Ideas of the human that stress language-use, reason, self-consciousness, autonomy and God-likeness are revised in his novels via a ‘poetic of testing’ which pits intertextually-referenced ideas against each other in polyphonic narratives. The study goes on to purport that without acknowledging Coetzee’s revisions of the human, other concerns in his novels such as ethics, the status of the animal, or racial politics cannot be fully understood. In addition to examining the philosophical provenance of questions of the human in the work of such thinkers as Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, Barthes and Foucault, the study charts Coetzee’s reconfiguration of elements drawn from major literary precursors like Cervantes, Heinrich von Kleist, Kafka and Beckett. Its leading argument is that Coetzee revises the Enlightenment idea of the human as a disengaged, autonomous thinker by demonstrating the limitations of reason; that he instead offers a view of humanity as engaged agency, a view most compatible with ideas developed in the discourse of posthumanism, theories of materiality and social practice theory; and that his revisions depend on narrative form as much as they recommend a narrative approach to ideas in general.

Crowd and Rumour in Shakespeare

Ashgate, 2012

In this study, the author offers new interpretations of Shakespeare's works in the context of two... more In this study, the author offers new interpretations of Shakespeare's works in the context of two major contemporary notions of collectivity: the crowd and rumour. The plays illustrate that rumour and crowd are mutually dependent; they also betray a fascination with the fact that crowd and rumour make individuality disappear. Shakespeare dramatizes these mechanisms, relating the crowd to class conflict, to rhetoric, to the theatre and to the organization of the state; and linking rumour to fear, to fame and to philosophical doubt. Paying attention to all levels of collectivity, Wiegandt emphasizes the close relationship between the crowd onstage and the Elizabethan audience. He argues that there was a significant - and sometimes precarious - metatheatrical blurring between the crowd on the stage and the crowd around the stage in performances of crowd scenes. The book's focus on crowd and rumour provides fresh insights on the central problems of some of Shakespeare's most contentiously debated plays, and offers an alternative to the dominant tradition of celebrating Shakespeare as the origin of modern individualism.

The Transnational in Literary Studies: Potential and Limitations of a Concept

Ed. Kai Wiegandt. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2020

This volume clarifies the meanings and applications of the concept of the transnational in litera... more This volume clarifies the meanings and applications of the concept of the transnational in literary studies and identifi es areas in which the concept can be particularly useful. Its contributors present case studies in which the concept replaces or complements dominant concepts in literary studies, assess the advantages and limitations of writing literary history with a transnational focus, and identify transnational genres.

Gegessen? Essen und Erinnerung in den Literaturen der Welt (ed. with Caspar Battegay, Lena Henningsen)

Neofelis, 2019

Gerichte, Essenspraktiken, zugeschriebene Bedeutungen sowie mit konkreten Gerichten verbundene As... more Gerichte, Essenspraktiken, zugeschriebene Bedeutungen sowie mit konkreten Gerichten verbundene Assoziationen und Erinnerungen unterscheiden sich je nach Kultur, gesellschaftlichen Verhältnissen und individuellen Dispositionen. Entsprechend sind Schilderungen von Essen und Praktiken des Essens besonders wirkmächtige literarische Werkzeuge, lassen sich so doch lebendige Bilder, Emotionen, Erinnerungen, Geschmäcker und Gerüche in den Leser*innen wachrufen.

Besonders häufig hat das Essen in der Literatur die Funktion eines Auslösers von Erinnerungen: Speisen werden zum verbindenden Element zwischen Gegenwart und Vergangenheit, Körper und Geist, sinnlicher Wahrnehmung und erinnertem Leben. Prousts ‚Madeleine-Episode‘ in Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit ist nur eines von vielen Beispielen. Die Beiträge in Gegessen? befragen Texte der Weltliteratur aus den letzten zwei Jahrtausenden nach den Praktiken des Essens, den Bedeutungszuschreibungen von Speisen und dem Zusammenhang zwischen Essen und Erinnerung.

The Return of the Historical Novel? Thinking About Fiction and History After Historiographic Metafiction (ed. with Andrew James Johnston)

Winter, 2017

Until recently, the critical reception of historical fiction was dominated by two theoretical par... more Until recently, the critical reception of historical fiction was dominated by two theoretical paradigms: György Lukács’s Marxist view and Linda Hutcheon’s concept of ‘historiographic metafiction’. We are now entering a new phase as the discussion of the historical novel is rapidly becoming more inclusive, more tolerant and, above all, more diverse. It is before the backdrop of these changes in the critical debate that the contributions to this volume are meant to be read. Rather than seeing historical fiction as locked in a clear-cut scheme of teleological succession or assigning to the historical novel specific aesthetic purposes, the articles in this collection seek to probe deeply into the historical novelʼs potential for providing readers not simply with an understanding of how the image of the past is constructed but also of how attempts to chart forms of historical otherness constitute a specific mode of cultural experience mediated by literature.

This desire for a literary experience of historical otherness has recently increased in urgency, even if the historical authenticity one might nostalgically associate with such a project must always elude us. Authors discussed include Walter Scott, John Fowles, Graham Swift, M. J. Vassanji, J. M. Coetzee, Peter Ackroyd, Alan Massie, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Hilary Mantel and Jim Crace.

J. M. Coetzee and the Non-English Literary Traditions (Special Issue ed. with Maria-Jesús Lopez)

European Journal of English Studies 20:2, 2016

Empathy and Understanding Others (Special Issue ed. with Miriam Akkermann, Ulrike Endesfelder, Philipp Kanske

by Kai Wiegandt and Miriam Akkermann

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 43:2, 2018

Trieb: Poetiken und Politiken einer modernen Letztbegründung (ed. with Jan Niklas Howe)

Kadmos, 2014

Mit Beiträgen von Rupert Gaderer, Mario Grizelj, Jan Niklas Howe, Burkhard Liebsch, Bastian Ronge... more Mit Beiträgen von Rupert Gaderer, Mario Grizelj, Jan Niklas Howe, Burkhard Liebsch, Bastian Ronge, Veronika Thanner, Johannes Türk, Joseph Vogl, Jan Völker, Kai Wiegandt.

»Triebe« werden seit dem 18. Jahrhundert als Erklärungsmuster für das Natürliche und Normale, das Widernatürliche und Anormale, das Unbewusste und Unkontrollierte herangezogen. Sehr unterschiedliche Triebe erklären von der Entstehung des Lebens bis zu pathologischem Sozialverhalten eine gewaltige Bandbreite von Phänomenen: Nebeneinander stehen u.a. Bildungstrieb, Ernährungstrieb, Sexualtrieb, Zerstörungstrieb, Aufklärungstrieb, Mordtrieb, moralischer Trieb, ökonomischer Trieb. Was eigentlich ein Trieb ist, bleibt in den meisten historischen Bestimmungen unklar. Triebe werden mal als unsichtbares organisches Substrat deklariert, mal freimütig als heuristische Fiktion und im 20. Jahrhundert sogar als Mythologeme. Gemeinsam ist diesen Konzeptionen die Ausgangsidee einer doppelten Unhintergehbarkeit: Triebe werden in lebenspraktischer Hinsicht konzipiert als übermächtige und für das Triebsubjekt unkontrollierbare Instanzen, in epistemologischer Hinsicht als nicht weiter hinterfragbare, axiomatische Setzungen. Die Beiträge untersuchen aus philosophischer, wissensgeschichtlicher, literatur- und kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive, wie in der Moderne die Fremdbestimmung menschlichen Lebens durch sich selbst im Triebbegriff gefasst wird und welche politischen Kräfte in diesen Entwürfen wirksam sind.

Class Divides and Poverty in the Postcolonial Graphic Novel: A Reading of Sarnath Banerjee’s The Harappa Files (2011)

Un-Mapping the Global South. Ed. Gero Bauer, Nicole Hirschfelder, Fernando Resende. New York: Routledge, 2024

Following the present volume’s aim of ‘un-mapping’ the Global South by eschewing geographical loc... more Following the present volume’s aim of ‘un-mapping’ the Global South by eschewing geographical location in the Southern hemisphere as its defining feature, my chapter seeks to contribute to making the ‘Global South’ productive as a category of knowledge by identifying ‘Southern’ ways of seeing – and making them visible – in the contemporary graphic novel. Specifically, I will analyse the graphic novel The Harappa Files (2011) by Indian graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee and its aesthetic strategies of conveying to the reader a visceral sense of poverty and class divisions in the Indian metropolis. Instead of joining the debate about the proper definition of the Global South, my contribution thus emphasises concrete experiences and accounts of (post-)colonial dislocation and disenfranchisement, and how these experiences inform ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams) in the Global South. I show that The Harappa Files represents class divisions and poverty in post-liberation metropolitan India as part of an ongoing, though informal, economic imperialism inflicted upon and taking place in the Global South. Further, I demonstrate how Banerjee uses both ancient and urban myths from India to grapple with poverty and class divides, and how he taps the graphic novel’s semiotic potential to engage the reader’s imagination in ways unavailable to the solely text-based novel.

Introduction: Genres, Poetics and Subjectivities of Migration

Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2023

If it is true that no person ever experienced exactly the same as another, it is also true that n... more If it is true that no person ever experienced exactly the same as another, it is also true that no person ever experienced something that did not resemble someone else’s experience. Speaking of genres of migration literature is to acknowledge that experiences of migration resemble each other. Speaking of distinct poetics informing specific genres of migration literature acknowledges that evocations of different shared migratory experiences each tend to be represented by specific topoi and literary means. Different periods have given rise to different similarities and produced specific subgenres and poetics of migration literature. This is, in a nutshell, the reason why the contributors to this issue came together at the conference “Subjectivities of Migration: Poetics and Genre in the Literary Imagination of Migrant Experience since 1989” at the Barenboim-Said Akademie Berlin in September 2021. The present issue of Interventions presents selected papers from the conference in substantially revised and extended form.

Fiction’s Gothic Imagination of Reverse Domination: Western Migrants in Saudi Arabia (Hilary Mantel, Dave Eggers)

Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2023

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reverse colonization narratives, subsumed under the ... more Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reverse colonization narratives, subsumed under the rubric “imperial gothic” by Patrick Brantlinger, featured invasions from the colonial periphery to the imperial centre. This essay argues that recent decades have seen the emergence of similar “reverse domination narratives”. The narratives feature the migration of professionals from the Global North to the new economic centres in the Global South, where the migrants occupy subservient positions. As in the case of nineteenth-century reverse colonization narratives, gothic elements underpin the reversal of domination. In this essay I read two instances of these narratives – Hilary Mantel’s Eight Months on Ghazzah Street and Dave Eggers’s A Hologram for the King – as symptoms of Northern anxiety at losing economic, political, and cultural influence to regions perceived as threats to global supremacy.

Western Migrants in Hong Kong: Neo-Imperial Gothic and the Literary Imagination of Reverse Domination (Paul Theroux, Lawrence Osborne)

Configurations of Migration: Knowledges – Imaginaries – Media. Ed. Jennifer Leetsch, Frederike Middelhoff, Miriam Wallraven. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023

Shakespeare in and on Exile: Politicized Reading and Performative Writing in the Robben Island Shakespeare

Global Shakespeare and Social Injustice: Towards a Transformative Encounter. Ed. Chris Thurman, Sandra Young. London: Arden, 2023

Precarious Lives: Near-Death and Survival in Coetzee's Fiction

Journal of Modern Literature, 2023

Featuring numerous moments of close survival, J.M. Coetzee's novels display a double concern with... more Featuring numerous moments of close survival, J.M. Coetzee's novels display a double concern with precarity—the economic, social and political uncertainties suffered by disenfranchised and marginalized characters—and with the precariousness of life, i.e. the vulnerability and fragility of the body. The significance of the moments of close survival consists in the tension between the religious sense of the precarious as that which is undeservedly given and can be revoked at any time, and the purely man-made, political nature of precarity. Barely surviving, the privileged survivors of Coetzee's fictions are reminded that they owe not only their life to luck but also their privilege of being shielded from most threats to life.

Narrative as Realistic Thinking

Realism: Aesthetics, Experiments, Politics. Ed Jens Elze. New York: Bloomsbury, 2022

What is the benefit of embedding ideas in narratives? This chapter proposes that a specific answe... more What is the benefit of embedding ideas in narratives? This chapter proposes that a specific answer to this question-because it allows the reader to think them realistically-can be found in contemporary literature. To present ideas realistically, contemporary works suggest, means presenting them in the conditions which allow them to exist in the first place: embodied by someone and embedded in history and culture. The chapter consists of two parts. In the first part, I outline the realism proposed in J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (2003). 1 "Realism" does not refer here to a period in literary history nor to a mode of narrative that attempts to stay close to the facts of a historical time and place. Realism is Coetzee's term for an attitude toward ontology and epistemology that considers ideas inseparable from the things or people that embody them and from the situations in which these things or people are embedded. Realism is characteristic of narrative, but not of philosophical or scientific discourse, insofar as only narrative, by conveying the qualia of experience, allows the reader to think ideas in these conditions. In the second part, I read Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy (2014-18) as an engagement with this notion of narrative realism. Like Elizabeth Costello, the trilogy sometimes breaks with realism as a conventional mode of evoking reality, but at the same time affirms realism as the ability of narrative to present ideas realistically. In contrast to Elizabeth Costello, however, Cusk's trilogy suggests that our ideas (including our idea of self) are culturally shared rather than unique to each of us because our thinking is inflected by similar historical-cultural coordinates.

Imagining Disaster in the British Arts before the Grenfell Tower Fire: the Case of Ben Wheatley's "High-Rise" (2015)

Journal for the Study of British Cultures, 2021

In the popular arts, a general unease with the housing situation in London had articulated itself... more In the popular arts, a general unease with the housing situation in London had articulated itself long before the Grenfell Tower fire. Yet although the British arts had explored London’s housing crisis in manifold guises, most commentators from the middle-class majority said they had held a fire such as the one in Grenfell Tower unthinkable. In this article, I focus on a cinematic fiction released only a year before Grenfell that might shed some light on this apparent paradox: Ben Wheatley’s film High-Rise, made in 2015, based on J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel of the same name. The film illustrates, on the one hand, the arts’ unique strategies of imagining issues such as deregulation, privatization and gentrification. On the other hand, it illustrates the risk of repeating on the level of representation what deregulation, privatization and gentrification do on the ground: making specific segments of society disappear. I argue that, through constructing parallels with London’s contemporary high-rises and with developments in London’s housing market, the film invites reading the high-rise as a metaphor for London’s housing market, but in fact only sheds light on the effects of the crisis on London’s middle class. Nostalgia for council housing affordable for all replaces the working class who actually live there – a blind spot that was symptomatic of the British cultural imaginary before Grenfell.

Shakespeare and the Present: History and Mediality in Richard III

Shakespeare, 2020

In Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power Stephen Greenblatt employs a presentist mode of reading when he h... more In Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power Stephen Greenblatt employs a presentist mode of reading when he highlights how certain aspects of the play resonate with the current US presidency. The book rekindled debates about historicist versus presentist modes of reading Shakespeare. Neither Greenblatt nor his critics noted, however, that at the very centre of Richard III – the central play in Tyrant – Shakespeare inserted a dialogue on the very questions of whether historical documents give later generations access to the past, and how these documents should be interpreted. In this article I demonstrate that Richard III develops an idea of history that speaks to the question of historicism versus presentism by pointing towards the mediality of historical knowledge. I argue that, considered from a presentist perspective, the play’s reflections on orality and literacy in a culture turning from an oral to a literate culture speak more specifically to our political present than does Greenblatt’s character criticism of Richard.

New Paradigm or Another Trope of Resistance? A Response to 'The Global South and Literature'

Kairos, 2020

Introduction: The Concept of the Transnational in Literary Studies

The Transnational in Literary Studies: Potential and Limitations of a Concept. Ed. Kai Wiegandt. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2020

Transnational Migrant Fiction as World Literature: Identity, Translatability and the Global Book Market

The Transnational in Literary Studies: Potential and Limitations of a Concept. Ed. Kai Wiegandt. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter , 2020

In recent decades, a new literary genre written mainly by authors from the Global South living in... more In recent decades, a new literary genre written mainly by authors from the Global South living in North America and Europe has emerged. Mostly written in English, but also in French, German, and other languages, the (graphic) novels and stories of the genre describe the formation of migrant identities that do not primarily rely on nationalityneither on the original nationality nor on that affiliated with the destination country. Instead, these identities are formed by a variety of almost equal factors such as the birthplace of one's parents, one's place of residence, work, language, education, lifestyle, and culture. In this transnational migration fiction, the creation of identity resembles a collage of cultural elements from both the home and target cultures, between which the authors often oscillate. Discussing Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, and Taiye Selasi's Ghana Must Go, this chapter demonstrates how the modelling of identity in transnational migrant fiction is related to the function of the genre in the global book market: transnational migrant fiction is read around the world because it provides insights into foreign cultures, which makes it a particular kind of world literature as defined by David Damrosch. The genre's success is partly due to the way that it meets Western readers' sensibilities halfway. It suggests a continuity between the world of the Western reader with the foreign culture. Thematically, this continuity is suggested by conflicts that exist across national borders, such as social inequality and discrimination based on ethnicity and gender. This creates the impression of a general human situation, the local characteristics of which remain translatable.

Koreanische (Familien-)Geschichte, Trauma und Entsagung: Han Kangs "Die Vegetarierin" (2007) und der Geschmack der Weltliteratur

Gegessen? Essen und Erinnerung in den Literaturen der Welt. Ed. Caspar Battegay, Lena Henningsen, Kai Wiegandt, 2019

Shakespeare im und über Exil: die ‘Robben Island Bible’

Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 2019

In the 1970s Sonny Venkatrathnam was imprisoned on Robben Island, together with Nelson Mandela an... more In the 1970s Sonny Venkatrathnam was imprisoned on Robben Island, together with Nelson Mandela and other prominent opponents of apartheid. Venkatrathnam managed to bring Shakespeare’s Complete Works with him by telling a warder that the volume, covered with cards celebrating the Hindu festival of lights, was ‘his bible’. The book circulated amongst the detainees in the small single-cell section of the prison. Before Venkatrathnam was released, he invited his fellow inmates to mark a passage of their choice. Between 1975 and 1978 thirty-three of them did so and added their signatures. In his ground-breaking Hamlet’s Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare (2013) David Schalkwyk focuses on the trope of confinement resonating through the prisoners’ choices. The article traces a further pattern and argues that several highlighted passages evoke an exilic state resulting from being dispossessed of one’s homeland even while living in it; a state in which the political prisoners and, in fact, the majority of South Africans found themselves under apartheid. The marked passages concerned with exile, the article argues, offer an alternative view on colonial history in which the legitimacy of colonization is critiqued by stressing the exilic status of the colonizer. Offering such an alternative view makes the ‘Robben Island Shakespeare’ comparable to colonial and postcolonial rewritings of The Tempest.

The Politics of Food and Appetite in Anita Desai’s 'Fasting, Feasting' and V. S. Naipaul’s 'Half a Life'

Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 2019

This essay contends that materialist as well as culturalist views of resistance to particular foo... more This essay contends that materialist as well as culturalist views of resistance to particular foods fall short of grasping the sig- nificance of this resistance in Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting (1999) and V. S. Naipaul’s Half a Life (2001). It argues that a critical focus on postcoloniality is necessary to understand the treatment of food and appetite in these novels. These novels demonstrate how a history of domination has charged Indian material culture with political meaning: they implicitly relate the fates of their protago- nists in post-liberation India to Mohandas Gandhi and Indian nationalism’s ambivalence about whether to embrace the meat- eating of the former British colonisers or promote vegetarianism and fasting as elements of national identity. The novels suggest that a semantic over-determination of appetite and consumption transforms the sons’ resistance to the ways of their fathers into an unintended repetition of the positions of coloniser and colonised.

The Creature-Feeling as Secular Grace: On the Religious in J. M. Coetzee’s Fiction

Literature and Theology, 2018

In this article I argue that the epiphanies in J.M. Coetzee’s fiction can be read as literary en... more In this article I argue that the epiphanies in J.M. Coetzee’s fiction can be read
as literary enactments of the ‘creature-feeling’, a feeling of absolute dependence
on one’s creatureliness that was first described by the theologian Rudolf Otto. I
begin with a discussion of the creature-feeling with reference to William James’
The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) andRudolfOtto’s The Idea of the Holy
(1917). Critics have observed that Coetzee’s fictions suggest shared embodiment
as the basis for humans’ ethical responsibility towards other humans and
towards animals, and have focussed on Emmanuel Le´vinas when addressing
theological influences on Coetzee’s non-rational ethics. Bringing James and
Otto into the discussion allows me to account for those epiphanic moments
in Coetzee that do not overlap with the ethical or the aesthetic, moments in
which characters experience what I call secular grace. Coetzee is not the first to
enact the creature-feeling: he reworks earlier enactments by James Joyce.

Futurology, Allegory, Time Travel: What Makes Science Fiction Fascinating

The Fascination with Unknown Time. Ed. Sibylle Baumbach, Lena Henningsen, Klaus Oschema. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan., 2017

Shame, Guilt, and the Politics of Moral Change in Zoë Wicomb’s and Antje Krog’s Negotiations of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2017

This article argues that Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998) and Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story... more This article argues that Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998) and
Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story (2000) attempt to lift feelings of guilt and
shame from the victims of apartheid and to instil these feelings in
those who ought to feel them: in the perpetrators, but also in the
majority of whites and some coloureds who benefited from apartheid
in one way or another. Both authors stress the value of moral shame
for reforming South Africa’s society and focus on the body in their
literary representations of shame. Country of My Skull describes how
Krog’s body resonates with the pain of the victims when it shows
physical symptoms of shame and guilt. Wicomb’s novel David’s
Story, on the other hand, pictures the coloured body as a site of
shame concerning the coloureds’ ancestral origins. The majority of
coloureds ought to shed this unnecessary shame, Wicomb’s novel
suggests, while those who were complicit with apartheid should
acknowledge it as moral shame. Both texts complicate the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (TRC)’s differentiation between legally
verified “forensic truth” and “narrative truth” that allowed the victims
to privilege the particularities of their individual experience. Country
of My Skull suggests that the TRC hearings relied on a dynamic of
narrative transference and substitution that made the voicing of
shame and guilt possible in the first place. David’s Story suggests that
the distinction between “forensic truth” and “narrative truth” obscures
the fact that the hearings enabled perpetrators to suppress the truth
and avoid legal punishment.

History as Struggle of Generations: J. M. Coetzee’s 'The Master of Petersburg'

The Return of the Historical Novel? Thinking About Fiction and History After Historiographic Metafiction. Ed. Andrew James Johnston and Kai Wiegandt. Heidelberg: Winter., 2017

A droshky passes slowly down a street in the Haymarket district of St Petersburg" (MP 1 1). In it... more A droshky passes slowly down a street in the Haymarket district of St Petersburg" (MP 1 1). In its very first sentence, naming both a past century and an antiquated means of transport, J.M. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg (1994) stresses the historicity of its setting. The man in the droshky has come from Dresden where he lives with his wife and child and travels under the name Isaev, for he has debts in Russia and does not want to be recognized. The cause of his journey is the death of his stepson Pavel, the son of his deceased first wife, whom he has supported financially. The circumstances of Pavel's death are unclear. The man rents Pavel's room and begins looking for traces of Pavel. He meets the anarchist Sergei Nechaev of whom, it turns out, Pavel was a follower, and begins an affair with his stepson's host, Anna Sergeyevna. It becomes clear that the man from Dresden is Fyodor Dostoevsky. He is under the spell of the traces left by Pavel and of what he believes is Pavel's spirit surrounding him. He tries to conjure this spirit, but when it materializes and gradually takes possession of him, he attempts to exorcize it. 2 In the meantime, the angry youth of St Petersburg riot against the tsarist regime and there seems to be an uncanny relationship between Pavel' s spirit and the spirit of the times that becomes visible in the prerevolutionary riots and tensions between the generations. The manner in which historical processes here seem to be reflected by individual fates recalls Gyorgy Lukacs's demand that the historical novel must show individuals who are in the middle of and influenced by the clash of opposing "social trends and historical forces" (Lukacs, The Historical Novel 33) rather than personify these forces in great leaders or enact them in momentous, well-known events. The protagonist must have individual features while being typical of the times, and must be an observer, not an agent, of historical events; only such a character can perceive history impartially. The "specifically historical" of the historical novel is for Lukacs the "derivation of the individuality of characters from the historical peculiarity of their age" (Lukacs, The Historical Novel 19). It is through empathizing with the protagonist that the reader becomes aware of his own historical specificity. Coetzee's Dostoevsky seems to fulfil these requirements. He stands on the margin of the historical events around him instead of taking part, while as a canonical Henceforth The Master of Petersburg will be abbreviated as MP. 2 The novel's title possibly alludes to Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita in which the character Voland conjures spirits and tries to raise the dead (see Adelman, 'Stalking Stavrogin' 354).

J. M. Coetzee’s Complicated Migrations

Poetica, 2016

Kai Wiegandt (Berlin) J. M. COETZEE'S COMPLICATED MIGRATIONS In this artieie I read J. M. Coetzee... more Kai Wiegandt (Berlin) J. M. COETZEE'S COMPLICATED MIGRATIONS In this artieie I read J. M. Coetzee's novel Slow Man as arefleetion on how nationality infleets migrant identities and how migration ean result in a erippling of the seifthat the novel emblematieally duplieates in the amputation ofthe protagonist's leg after an aeeident. Diseussions of relevant passages from Coetzee's Diary 0/ a Bad Year and Here and Now eomplement my reading in whieh I show that Rayment's life in Australia is presented as a seeond, redueed stage of his life, a metaphorieal afterlife.