Monika Marons autobiografische Fiktion
Subtitle: Leben und Schreiben auf Dem Deutsch-Deutschen Bindestrich.
Published: 2005
Language: ger
Number of pages: 276
Description: Monika Maron's debut Flugasche was censored in the German Democratic Republic and was published 1981 in West Germany instead. With Maron's decision to stay in the capital of her communist homeland she became a German-German author "living and writing on the hyphen of the Berlin Wall". This dissertation takes a novel approach to Maron's Pawels Briefe, Flugasche, and Stille Zeile Sechs by interpreting them as "autobiographical fiction on the German-German hyphen". It situates these texts on the border between autobiography and fiction, or the "documentary" and the fictional; within the discourse of memory; and within German-German discourse both before and after the Unification in 1990. Beyond this the dissertation focuses on the retrospective character of Maron's narratives and her participation in re-negotiating cultural memory in unified Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Maron's hyphenated position in this "third space" accentuates the crossroad between East and West, between capitalism and communism, where many German bi-cultural "comings to terms with the past" are accumulated and many dualities become apparent: the schizophrenia between public and private, the identity crisis in real socialism, the internal conflict between victim and perpetrator, the tension between post-memory and "real" memory, the generation conflict, etc. Through close readings of Maron's texts in a reverse chronological order starting with the explicitly autobiographical Pawels Briefe (1999), the thesis offers intertextual readings of Maron's earlier fictional works, where the term autobiographical fiction serves to highlight biographical aspects and textual strategies that come into view only when read through the autobiographical lens provided by Pawels Briefe.The theoretical matrix includes: the concept of post-memory developed by Marianne Hirsch; theories of autobiographical writing developed by Azade Seyhan; and Philippe Lejeune's theory of the autobiographical pact between the writer and the reader. This triad of approaches can further capture a quality of Maron's "life-writing on the hyphen" that goes beyond its German context to participate in what Seyhan calls 'diasporic writing', sharing its new poetics of memory with other authors of the world displaced in different ways in the new Millennium, but never losing sight of a most turbulent 20th century.
Notes: Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2005.

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Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-06, Section: A, page: 2232.