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The Gender Of Authorship: Heiner Müller And Christa Wolf, Helen Fehervary

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The relationship between sexuality and politics has always been an underlying assumption of the avant-garde. In recent East German avant-garde literature, the notion of authorship as production has become associated with technological rationality and the patriarchal socialist state. The ensuing crisis of the traditional male author has thus led necessarily to a radicalization of subjectivity and to the politics of gender. A comparison of two contemporary texts, one by a female author, one by a male, shows that the crisis of authorship assumes two distinctly different forms when differences in gender are taken into account. The East German authors Heiner …