Interferenze con la tradizione e intertestualità in Yoko Tawada e Emine Sevgi Özdamar

Abstract

The aim of this work is to formalize the contact between the canonical literature, belonging to the 'tradition', and the new panorama of the migration literature in the German speaking countries. The first section of the work offers a general reflection on the theories and systems of the canonical literature, understood as the result of a combination of the aspect of both the cultural and literary memory and the concept of value judgment. Such an overview is intended to reveal on the one hand the heuristic problem of canonical literature and on the other hand the horizons of redefinition and contamination to which it is exposed. Starting from the question of the utility and the need for a literary canon today, there is a review of the practices of remembrance and judgment that have influenced and modeled the image of 'traditional' and 'classical' literature. These two aspects represent the core the considerations in the second chapter, in which, after having defined the relationship between classicism and canonicity, a particular attention is turned to two fundamental contributions in the field of theories of canonical literature: Harold Bloom with his Western canon and Marcel Reich-Ranicki with the monumental project entitled Der Kanon. The study of the case of Reich-Ranicki allows a first comparison with the canonical and traditional question in the German-speaking countries, which will become a real object in the third chapter. In the third section of the present work an overview of the processes of denormativization of the concept of 'literary tradition', starting from the presence of the authors of the so-called Migrationsliteratur in the German-language literary scene, and on the other of cultural contaminations and sociological on the international scene. It is within this conceptual framework that the textual reflections are inserted. The first analytical reflection is addressed to the textual and aesthetic influence of Franz Kafka's work in Yoko Tawada’s work, by introducing the analysis of some texts in which clear references and rethinking of the Kafkaesque stylistic formula emerge, with a reflection on the representations of otherness and strangeness. In the context of the literary comparison between Kafka and Tawada we focused in particular on two works from the early production of the Japanese-German author, Das Bad (1989) and Ein Gast (1993), that are inserted in a dialogue circle with that way of writing and thinking about the world that we now identify as Kafkaesque. The second textual analysis focuses on the overwhelming influence of Brecht's work in the writing of the Turkish-German author Emine Sevgi Özdamar. In order to give a heterogeneous image of this influence, we consider two works: a novel, Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde (2003), and a theatrical piéce, Perikizi. Ein Traumspiel (2010). [edited by Author]