Spaces of Alterity in West German Postcolonial and Science- Fiction Literature After Sixty-Eight
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
LITERATURE AS UTOPIA: SPACES OF ALTERITY IN WEST GERMAN POSTCOLONIAL AND SCIENCE- FICTION LITERATURE AFTER SIXTY-EIGHT Kirkland Alexander Fulk A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures. Chapel Hill 2013 Approved by: Richard Langston Eric Downing Jonathan Hess Mark Hansen Priscilla Layne © 2013 Kirkland Alexander Fulk ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii Abstract KIRKLAND ALEXANDER FULK: Literature as Utopia: Spaces of Alterity in West German Postcolonial and Science-Fiction Literature after Sixty-Eight (Under the direction of Richard Langston) The dominant narrative surrounding West German literature of the seventies maintains that following the collapse of the student movement around 1968, the collective utopian aspirations of this generation gave way to the loss thereof in the new emphasis on private, political subjectivity in the following decade. Literature as Utopia challenges such commonplace accounts by examining spatial alterity in postcolonial and science fiction literature of the 1970s written by Nicolas Born, Hubert Fichte, Alexander Kluge, and the anonymous cult writer P.M. This study reassess the currency of utopia after 1968—both the “good place” and “no place”—by probing these authors’ works using post-Adornian aesthetic theories that emerged concurrently in West Germany in the seventies, namely those of Karl Heinz Bohrer, Hans Robert Jauß, Wolfgang Iser, Dieter Wellershoff, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge. In addition, my dissertation traffics in the larger intellectual history surrounding the 1970s by bringing my primary texts into dialogue with theorists outside of Germany such as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Susan Sontag, Clifford Geertz, Henri Lefebvre, and others in order to assess the ways in which the literature of this period begins to respond to theory. In this dissertation, I argue that this post-revolutionary literature was particularly adept at opening textual spaces in which the idea of utopia could regain a foothold as a socio-critical force after its demise just a few years earlier. iii Acknowledgements A project such as this is never a solitary undertaking. There are, indeed, numerous people and institutions that helped along the way. First and foremost I would like to thank my advisor Dr. Richard Langston for his insight and feedback throughout every stage of this dissertation. His constant encouragement as well as all the time and work he put into reading and rereading every word were crucial in making this dissertation successful. I owe a great deal of gratitude to the members of my committee as well for their support of this project and all of their comments that helped shaped the final product. This disseration was also made possible by a Fulbright Dissertation Research Grant that enabled me to spend a year in Germany completing my dissertation and working with Dr. Hans-Edwin Friedrich at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. I am very thankful to my fellow graduate students for listening to and discussing different parts of this work over the last five years. Further, my incredible parents and family as well as my dear friends provided the pivotal emotional support necessary for completing this project. Lastly, and most importantly, I owe everything to my loving wife, Maison. Were she not there to push me when times were bleak, I never would have made it across the finish line. Her sacrifices and continuous reassurance were the bedrock of this dissertation. iv Table of Contents Introduction After the Deluge: From a Politics of the Self to Spatial Alterity ............................. 1 The Other Worlds of the 1970s: Dieter Kühn’s Und der Sultan von Oman ............................... 6 After Adorno: Aesthetic Theory and The Return of Utopia in the Seventies ........................... 17 The Utopian Horizon: Postcolonialism and Science Fiction .................................................... 32 Chapter 1 Knowing Other Worlds: Wittgenstein’s Paradox in Nicolas Born’s Die Fälschung .. 46 Postcolonial Utopia: A Paradox Revealed ................................................................................ 46 Die Fälschung and the Desire for Other Worlds ....................................................................... 53 Reporting from Other Worlds ................................................................................................... 63 Photography and the Colonial Gaze ......................................................................................... 75 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 83 Chapter 2 Communicating with Other Worlds: Hubert Fichte and Leonore Mau’s Xango: ....... 86 Between the Land of Laughter and the Sad Tropics ................................................................. 91 Herodotus and Fichte’s Poetic Anthropology ........................................................................... 93 Xango: Establishing a Dialogue with Other Worlds .............................................................. 100 Visual Dialogue and the Postcolonial Gaze ............................................................................ 116 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 133 v Chapter 3 Capital, The Final Frontier: Science Fiction, Allegory, and Utopia in Alexander Kluge’s Lernprozesse mit tödlichem Ausgang ........................................................................... 136 From Other Space to Outer Space .......................................................................................... 136 Lernprozesse as Science Fiction and Allegory: Benjamin and Kluge .................................... 144 Lernprozesse as Outer Space .................................................................................................. 158 The Outer Spaces of Capital ................................................................................................... 163 Conclusion: Back to the Future .............................................................................................. 181 Chapter 4 Marxism in Outer Space: The Future of Utopia in P.M.’s Weltgeist Superstar ....... 184 Introduction: Marxism is Dead, Long Live Literature ........................................................... 184 The Death of Marxism: Epistolary, Detective Novel, and Science Fiction ............................ 191 The Passion and Utopia of Weltgeist Superstar ...................................................................... 212 Conclusion: Literature as Utopia, Utopia as Paradox ............................................................. 232 Conclusion Looking Backward, Looking Forward: From Other Worlds to Simulations of Alterity ........................................................................................................................................ 236 Utopia Reconstructed .............................................................................................................. 236 Beyond the Seventies: Postmodernism, Simulation, and Utopian Skepticism ....................... 239 Beyond Literature: Postcolonial and Science-Fiction Film after Sixty-Eight ........................ 243 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 252 vi Introduction After the Deluge: From a Politics of the Self to Spatial Alterity In the wake of the revolts that shook West Germany in the late 1960s, literature ostensibly shifted its focus from the realm of social politics and collective utopian aspirations to a new emphasis on private subjectivity and a politics of the self—or so the story goes.1 While the decade following the collapse of the student movement is undoubtedly distinguished by the rise of “Neue Subjektivität” or “Neue Innerlichkeit,” there was more to this period than first meets the eye. This dissertation does not completely refute this commonly-held trajectory in literary history or the predominance of New Subjectivity in literary production. To be sure, New Subjectivity was not a wholehearted eschewal of the political, but rather a critical redefinition thereof that brought about new movements, such as 2 the Greens and feminism. Rather, this dissertation adds another dimension to this narrative. 1 See for example, David Roberts, “From the 1960s to the 1970s: The Changing Contexts of German Literature,” in After the Death of Literature, Keith Bullivant, ed. (Oxford: Berg, 1989), pp. xi-xxiii, David Roberts, “Tendenzwenden: Die sechziger und siebziger Jahre in literaturhistorischer Perspektive,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 56:2 (June 1982), pp. 290-313, Richard W. McCormick, Politics of the Self: Feminism and the Postmodern in West German Literature and Film (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991), Moray McGowan, “Neue Subjektivität,” in After the Death of Literature, pp.53-68, Leslie Adelson, “Subjectivity Reconsidered: Botho Strauss and Contemporary West German Prose,” New German Critique, No. 30 (Autumn 1983), pp. 3-59. 2 See David Roberts, “Tendenzwenden: Die sechziger und siebziger Jahre in literaturhistorischer Perspektive,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte,