Authors and the World

Reviews / Votes

Rebecca Braun's amazingly varied study of authorship shifts the view from the lives of writers to the practice of authorship - the crafted persona of a whole social environment. Along the way, Braun shakes up our understanding of the contemporary German literary scene. Moving quickly past the familiar male gatekeepers of Grass, Enzensberger and Walser, she brings us face-to-face with neglected literary mavericks from the East and new voices of women immigrants from Russia, Romania
and Serbia. A very original study in which 'place' becomes a fleeting ideological Heimat. * Timothy Brennan, Professor of Comparative Literature and English, University of Minnesota, USA * Rebecca Braun's Authors and the World represents an important foray into a new contemporary typology of authorship that will benefit scholars in literary studies and beyond. With a focus on German-speaking literature, this investigation of celebratory, commemorative, utopian and satirical modes of authorship provides the reader with pertinent insights into the post-war literary industry and its modes of self-representation and brings into focus female writers marginalized in recent canonization processes. * Birgit Lang, Professor of German, University of Melbourne, Australia * Highly original and immensely readable, Rebecca Braun's impressive study provides us with a new model for understanding literary authorship and the contexts and factors that shape it in the twentieth century and beyond. The result is both a brilliant reading of cultural history and an important theoretical re-evaluation of known concepts of authorship. Through detailed interpretations of a stunning variety of cultural texts and archives (novels, journalistic writings, poetry, films and documentaries, social networks, places, and objects), Braun develops four distinct modes of performative authorship (celebratory, commemorative, utopian, satirical) and shows how they can overlap, coalesce, and inflect one another. She uses this innovative framework to read of some of the most important texts of the German-language canon in East and West Germany; she moves from the writing of the "literary giants" of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Thomas Mann to the contemporary, transnational texts of Olga Martynova and Katja Petrowskaja. Conversations with three female authors round out this remarkable book and illustrate in practice Braun's central argument that authorship is a co-creative, iterative process. Authors and the World will be an indispensable reference in German Studies on contemporary literary authorship. I loved reading it! * Anke S. Biendarra, Associate Professor of European Languages and Studies, University of California, Irvine, USA *