Roczniki Humanistyczne 2024 (Fascicle 5: Modern Languages)

Interweavings – intersections – interconnections in German and German literary texts

Contemporary culture is constantly being confronted with crises, catastrophes and wars, the effects of which are played out on a global scale. The universal ideal of humankind as rational beings, subjugating the planet, and the belief in the necessity of progress and continuous development as the basic paradigms of Western culture, have lost their moral and epistemological legitimacy (Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 2011) Nationalistic tendencies, imperialism, racism, the exclusion of ethnic and sexual minorities – these are processes that, despite many years of criticism and reflection, are still gaining momentum, even in European cultures. Contemporary German-language literature has been engaged in debate with such closed ideological systems for decades, questioning the essentialist definitions of humankind and the hierarchical systems of power.

               The editors of Roczniki Humanistyczne, fascicle 5 Modern Languages would therefore like to invite you to take part in literary reflections on the opposing of the traditional models of dualistic thinking, e.g. ‘we vs. the other/foreign’, ‘white vs. colour’, ‘women vs. men’, ‘hetero vs. homo’, as well as of those hegemonic approaches of preclusive culture, understood as a hermetic national system based on one’s mother tongue (J.G. Herder). We would like to show the attempts made in German and German-language literature at breaking down these uniform systems.

Questions that arise in this context may relate to the following issues:

– interweavings, rhizomes (Deleuze / Guattari 1970), intersections, alternative interconnections at the level of narration, the construction of perspectives, time, literary figures
– the interpenetration and interconnection of various cultural and linguistic systems, ("Zusammenfluss" der Kulturen, Trojanow / Hoskote 2007)

– hybridity, the disturbance of linearity, the intertwining between past, present and future narratives (L. A. Adelson “Touching Tales” 2000)
– the breaking down of human hegemonicity and homogeneity (posthumanist, post-immigration, post-nationalist, postcolonial, transnational approaches)
– the overcoming of traditional dualisms concerning nation and ethnicity
– the interpenetration and intertwining of languages, multilingualism in literary texts, translations, and their reception.