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German Language and Literature

1993

Christa Wolf

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

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Between Female Dialogics And Traces Of Essentialism: Gender And Warfare In Christa Wolf's Major Writings, Sabine Wilke Jun 1993

Between Female Dialogics And Traces Of Essentialism: Gender And Warfare In Christa Wolf's Major Writings, Sabine Wilke

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The relationship between memory, writing, and the question of how we define ourselves as gendered subjects is at the center of Christa Wolf's work. Her literary production, starting in the late fifties with a rather naive and un-selfconscious love story, has undergone a dramatic shift. In her more recent texts, Wolf sets out to rewrite classical mythology to make us aware of those intersections in the history of Western civilization at which women were made economically and psychologically into objects. The present essay seeks to locate Christa Wolf's evolving conception of gender and warfare within the contemporary theoretical discussion on …


The Difficulty Of Saying "I": Translation And Censorship Of Christa Wolf's Der Geteilte Himmel, Katharina Von Ankum Jun 1993

The Difficulty Of Saying "I": Translation And Censorship Of Christa Wolf's Der Geteilte Himmel, Katharina Von Ankum

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The end of the GDR in 1990 triggered a vivid literary debate in Germany which focused on the interrelationship of politics, literature, and criticism. In this context, the work of Christa Wolf was attacked as primary example of self-censorship and collaboration. In my article, I argue that Wolf became the target of literary criticism largely because of her attempt to express female subjectivity in her texts. In my contrastive analysis of Der geteilte Himmel (1963) and its English translation (1965), I read Wolf's text as an initial attempt at a "socialist modernism." The continued value of this and subsequent works …