Synopsis "Herta Muller: Politics and Aesthetics (in English)"
Two languages-German and Romanian-inform the novels, essays, and collage poetry of Nobel laureate Herta Müller. Describing her writing as "autofictional," Müller depicts the effects of violence, cruelty, and terror on her characters based on her own experiences in Communist Romania under the repressive Nicolae Ceauşescu regime. Herta Müller: Politics and Aesthetics explores Müller's writings from different literary, cultural, and historical perspectives. Part 1 features Müller's Nobel lecture, five new collage poems, and an interview with Ernest Wichner, a German-Romanian author who has traveled with her and sheds light on her writing. Parts 2 and 3, featuring essays by scholars from across Europe and the United States, address the political and poetical aspects of Müller's texts. Contributors discuss life under the Romanian Communist dictatorship while also stressing key elements of Müller's poetics, which promises both self-conscious formal experimentation and political intervention. One of the first books in English to thoroughly examine Müller's writing, this volume addresses audiences with an interest in dissident, exile, migration, experimental, and transnational literature. Bettina Brandt taught at MIT, Columbia University, and Montclair State before joining the faculty at Pennsylvania State University. She has published on contemporary women writers such as Emine Özdamar and Yoko Tawada. Valentina Glajar is a professor of German at Texas State University, San Marcos. She is the coauthor of several books, including Local History, Transnational Memory in the Romanian Holocaust, and is the cotranslator of Müller's Traveling on One Leg.
