Nina Nowara-Matusik

Some More Thoughts on Künstlerroman: The German Approach (with a Few Excursions)

This paper deals with the problem of using of the German term Künstlerroman (meaning artist-novel) in the German and Polish literary studies. It describes and comments some analytical contexts and contemporary approaches, focusing on the encyclopedic and lexical sources. The conclusion is, that the term Künstlerroman still has not been defined perfectly and needs further exploring, especially in the light of the category gender and contemporary narrative theories.

The Upper Silesian author Arthur Silbergleit is less known than his compatriot, Horst Bienek, who immortalized Silbergleit in his Gleiwitzer Tetralogie. Silbergleit was a prolific poet: apart from his prose, he wrote about 600 poems. His work is influenced by his descent and his personal experience oft the First World War. The following thesis is an attempt at interpretation of the war discourse in his works written during or after the war: in the poetry collections Flandern (1916) and Balalaika (1918), in the story Der Fremde and in the collection of lyrical miniatures Das Füllhorn Gottes. Pastele (1919). My analysis shows, that Silbergleit employs Christian and mythological motifs; his intention is to universalize the experience of the war and to depict it as a complex metaphor.
 

„Should our Antedates Have Been People Like These?“ A Try of Postcolonial Reading of the Story about Darwin by Eberhard Hilscher

The following paper presents a postcolonial reading (combined with the ideology-critical approach) of the little-known story about Darwin by the East German writer Eberhard Hilscher. The analysis focuses on the perception of the foreign and the own by the fi gures of the story and it also refers to the overlapping of the terms race and class. The considerations lead to the conclusion that in the story the foreign is constructed preferably with the help of the opposition culture (the own) and nature (the foreign), and that hierarchical and dichotomous thinking characterizes also Darwin, even if in his case one can see certain ambivalences.