Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Developing a Nomadic Ethics
- 1 Seeing Strangely: Birgit Vanderbeke's Ways of Knowing
- 2 Creature Comforts: Economadism in the Work of Dorothea Grünzweig
- 3 Disorientations: Queer, East German Nomadism in the Work of Antje Rávic Strubel
- 4 Uncanny Returns: Anna Mitgutsch's Austrian Nomadic Postmemory
- 5 Facing the Other: Barbara Honigmann and Jewish Nomadic Ethics
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Seeing Strangely: Birgit Vanderbeke's Ways of Knowing
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Developing a Nomadic Ethics
- 1 Seeing Strangely: Birgit Vanderbeke's Ways of Knowing
- 2 Creature Comforts: Economadism in the Work of Dorothea Grünzweig
- 3 Disorientations: Queer, East German Nomadism in the Work of Antje Rávic Strubel
- 4 Uncanny Returns: Anna Mitgutsch's Austrian Nomadic Postmemory
- 5 Facing the Other: Barbara Honigmann and Jewish Nomadic Ethics
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
What can she know?
— Lorraine CodeBeing is not only itself, it escapes itself.
— Emmanuel Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow”Nomadic Knowing
Postmodernism is widely understood to privilege disunity over coherence, leaving morality an uncertain business. If the subject is joyously free and nomadic, how can attachments to others emerge and persist? The “strange subjects” this study explores all in fact assert ethical behaviors alongside, or within, mobility. As the work of Sara Ahmed and Rosi Braidotti implies, a refusal to be fixed and bounded is indeed a prerequisite for an openness to engage with others. The subject's performances are in any case always relational. This insight comes to the fore in the work of Birgit Vanderbeke, a writer who also challenges Germanness and gender. As we will see, her work practices and encourages a strange way of knowing.
Vanderbeke was born in 1956 in Dahme/Mark in the GDR, and moved with her family to West Germany in 1961. She was brought up in Frankfurt am Main, where she later studied law and French. Her first novella, Das Muschelessen (1990; The Mussel Feast, 2013) received the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. In 1993, Vanderbeke moved to the south of France. She is the author of eleven subsequent novellas, a cookbook, and a travel guide. A volume of essays, interviews, and reviews concerned with Vanderbeke appeared in Germany in 2001. In Anglo-American German studies, however, her work has received little attention.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Nomadic Ethics in Contemporary Women's Writing in GermanStrange Subjects, pp. 29 - 62Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012