Modern Languages & Cultures

In her article "Evoking a Memory of the Future in Foer's Everything is Illuminated" Doro Wiese discusses Jonathan Safran Foer's novel. In the text a photograph plays a decisive role: the image of two young people drives the Jewish American Jonathan to visit the Ukraine. The photograph is presumably of Jonathan's grandfather Safran and a woman named Augustine who saved Safran's life during a nazi raid of his village: the photograph becomes an ekphrasis, a description of a visual work of art in another medium which transforms the generic characteristics of written and photographic representations. According to Anselm Haverkamp, photographs are visual citations from history and about history: they show not only people and/or objects at a specific moment in time, but also point towards the irretrievability of that moment. Yet, when photography is transposed into another medium that performs the effects of a confrontation with the given-to-deathness of the people displayed, photography-in-ekphrasis might perform not only mourning over the irretrievability of the life that is lost, but the ethical necessity to resist the devaluation of life in the present

Tracey Emin's Top Spot (Emin 2004a) is a feature film that defies clear-cut definitions of genre. Interview extracts and other footage in different film formats, edited in a careless style, seem to suggest that it is an unedited collection of images, a "random assemblage" that viewers receive in raw form. In this seemingly unedited format, the film pretends to document a previously filmed reality: an archive that establishes the coming-of-age story of six girls who live in Margate, England, where they roam the beach, the train station, the amusement park, the disco. Wavering between naivety and precociousness, the girls make their first sexual experiences, sometimes eager to explore their own sexuality, sometimes brutally coerced into sexual acts. In a society all too prepared to sexualize and exploit their bodies, the peer group becomes the only place where their own desires and fears may emerge.

Top Spot thus records two crucial moments in the girls' coming-of-age: it shows how their sexuality is captured by society, and it registers their lines of flight from dominant expectations and gender roles, materializing Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the girl's stolen body and its counterparts, becoming-woman and becoming-girl. Considering that anyone acquainted with Tracey Emin's biography may understand Top Spot as a film displaying her own experiences, I will explore how Emin extends common notions of "biography as honest self-depiction"; by employing fictional devices, the telling of life-stories becomes a constructive move to reappropriate one's body and history. In the following, I will link this film interpretation to feminist interpretations of Deleuze and Guattari.

Can literature make it possible to represent histories that are otherwise ineffable? Making use of the Deleuzian concept of “the powers of the false,” Doro Wiese offers readings of three novels that deal with the Shoah, with colonialism, and with racialized identities. She argues that Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, and Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing are novels in which a space for unvoiced, silent, or silenced difference is created. Seen through the lens of Deleuze and his collaborators’ philosophy, literature is a means for mediating knowledge and affects about historical events. Going beyond any simple dichotomy between true and untrue accounts of what “really” happened in the past, literature’s powers of the false incite readers to long for a narrative space in which painful or shameful stories can be included.

In Gould’s Book of Fish (2003), author Richard Flanagan manages to invent a format in which content and style account for historical events on Sarah Island, Tasmania in the 1820s, yet he does so in a manner that is not in the least objective, disinterested or fact-orientated. The perspective of Gould’s Book of Fish’s (Flanagan, 2003) first-person narrator is highly subjective, usually unreliable and always less than truthful. Flanagan (2003) thereby shows that literature can provide a form of knowledge that differs from historical truth, but without being its dialectical opposite. Literature can construct a non-referential narrative space in which experiences unfold that hardly unimaginable. Literature can show the urge and desire to understand historical events that are terrible to relate to. It can invent a story that can account for the consequences of a violent colonial system. Yet, above all, the novel stresses a desire to render stories of unspeakable horrors through what can be call the “becoming-fish” of its first-person narrator. This desire expresses a hyperbolic love of each and everyone, one which extends so far as to even include all the other wonders of this world in its account too. By depicting convicts and natives as loving and lovable persons, author Richard Flanagan (2003) refrains from reducing them to the colonial conditions in which they were caught up. He thereby offers a point of view that differs from Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) highly influential account of “bare life.” I will take this perspective, in which life and its conditions cannot be lumped together, as a point of departure from which to criticise Agamben’s (1998) transhistorical and transnational account of biopolitical determinations of life.

This essay discusses the effects of two stylistic devices used in a graphic novel and a film, both entitled Blue is the Warmest Color. In the case of the graphic novel, written by the French comic-book writer Julie Maroh, her use of the colour blue will be focused upon. Since large parts of the graphic novel are drawn in sepia tones, certain blue items are highlighted and stand out. This highlighting will be analysed by connecting it to insights established by the French philosopher Luce Irigaray. Irigaray links the use of colour in painting – literally and metaphorically understood as a way to create space and temporality – to the establishment of a singular and subjective perspective. Since the graphic novel Blue is the Warmest Color is simultaneously a romance, a coming-of-age story, and a coming out story, Irigaray’s call for a unique perspective is connected to Maroh’s aim to make lesbian desire available as a choice. Maroh’s use of colour will subsequently be contrasted with French film-director Abdellatif Kechiche’s prominent use of close-ups in his feature film of the same name. To analyse the use of the close-up, this essay will make use of Mary Ann Doane’s analysis of the disconcerting effects it produces. In her view, the close-up is an image that is severed from its context, from time, from place, and from narrative. This research will show that the viewers’ alignment with the camera will bring embodied social hierarchies back into the viewing process when seeing Kechiche’s film.

Die Faust als Symbol des Widerstands ist zum Klischee erstarrt. Wie kann und sollte es reaktiviert werden? Welcher Umgang mit Geschichte und Gesellschaft ist möglich und wünschenswert? Und was genau steht einer Öffnung zum sozialen Beteiligtsein im Wege? Entlang zweier Kunstwerke von Anna Lena Grau soll diesen Fragen nachgegangen werden. Zentral stehen dabei Affekte, Informationen, zeitliche Dauer, digitale Körperformationen und neoliberale Selbstbilder sowie die Möglichkeit, Kommunikation, Arbeit und Miteinander neu zu gestalten.