
Moving Words
Literature, Memory, and Migration in Berlin
Andrew Brandel(Author)
University of Toronto Press
Published on 25. July 2023
Book
Hardback
284 pages
978-1-4875-4368-6 (ISBN)
Description
In the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Berlin has re-emerged as a global city in large part thanks to its reputation as a literary city - a place where artists from around the world gather and can make a life. Moving Words foregrounds the many contexts in which life in the city of Berlin is made literary - from old neighbourhood bookshops to new reading circles, NGOs working to secure asylum for writers living in exile to specialized workshops for young migrant poets. Highlighting the differences, tensions, and contradictions of these scenes, this book reveals how literature can be both a site of domination and a resource for resisting and transforming those conditions. By attending to the everyday lives of writers, readers, booksellers, and translators, it offers a crucial new vantage point on the politics of difference in contemporary Europe, at a moment marked by historical violence, resurgent nationalism, and the fraught politics of migration.
Rooted in ethnographic fieldwork, rich historical archives, and literary analysis, Moving Words examines the different claims people make on and for literature as it carries them through the city on irregular and intersecting paths. Along the way, Brandel offers a new approach to the ethnography of literature that aims to think anthropologically about crossings in time and in space, where literature provides a footing in a world constituted by a multiplicity of real possibilities.
Rooted in ethnographic fieldwork, rich historical archives, and literary analysis, Moving Words examines the different claims people make on and for literature as it carries them through the city on irregular and intersecting paths. Along the way, Brandel offers a new approach to the ethnography of literature that aims to think anthropologically about crossings in time and in space, where literature provides a footing in a world constituted by a multiplicity of real possibilities.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Toronto
Canada
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
590 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4875-4368-6 (9781487543686)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Andrew Brandel is an associate instructional professor of the social sciences at the University of Chicago.
Content
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Berlin, City of Letters
2. The Prosody of Social Ties: Poetry and Fleeting Moments in a Workshop
3. Exile in Translation: The Politics of Remaining Unknown
4. In the Footsteps of a Flaneur: A Grammar of Returning (to a Street)
5. Collecting, Selecting, Connecting: Making Books and Making Do
6. Life in a Net of Language: Literature, Translation, and the Feel of Words
Notes
References
Index
1. Introduction: Berlin, City of Letters
2. The Prosody of Social Ties: Poetry and Fleeting Moments in a Workshop
3. Exile in Translation: The Politics of Remaining Unknown
4. In the Footsteps of a Flaneur: A Grammar of Returning (to a Street)
5. Collecting, Selecting, Connecting: Making Books and Making Do
6. Life in a Net of Language: Literature, Translation, and the Feel of Words
Notes
References
Index