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Feridun Zaimoglu made a spectacular entrance onto the German cultural scene in 1995 with Kanak Sprak: a volume of incendiary texts based on interviews with disaffected Turkish German youths, using an invented, stylized literary language, a hybrid of multiple varieties of German with a hip hop beat. A prolific and acclaimed novelist, dramatist, newspaper columnist, visual artist and live performer, Zaimoglu has remained in the public eye through controversy and reinvention. His more recent work appropriates German literary traditions in radically new ways, adapting Romantic styles, narrative forms and motifs to postmodern conditions.
This volume features the suppressed original first chapter of Leyla, Zaimoglu's critically and commercially most successful novel, first published in 2006, as well as an extensive interview with the author. Critical essays on his writing by major scholars in the field cover issues of gender, language and power, the politics of ethnicity, religion, Romanticism and anti-modernism, and the challenges of translating his work. This is the first volume of criticism in any language dedicated to Zaimoglu's literary work.
List of contents
Contents: Feridun Zaimoglu/Tom Cheesman/Karin E. Yesilada: The Unpublished First Chapter of Leyla: Facsimile Typescript, English Translation and Commentary - Tom Cheesman/Karin E. Yesilada: 'Ich bin nicht modern'/'I'm not modern': Interviews with Feridun Zaimoglu - Yasemin Yildiz: Wordforce: Ethnicized Masculinity and Literary Style in Kanak Sprak and Koppstoff - Kristin Dickinson/Robin Ellis/Priscilla Layn: Linguistic Rebellion in Koppstoff - Tom Cheesman: Nathan Without the Rings: Postmodern Religion in Nathan Messias - Karin E. Yesilada: 'God's Warriors': A Green Thread in the Work of Feridun Zaimoglu - Frauke Matthes: 'Der Fremde ... das war dein Vater': Turkish Muslim Masculinism in Leyla - Yasemin Dayioglu-Yücel: Authorship and Authenticity in Migrant Writing: the Plagiarism Debate on Leyla - Petra Fachinger: Rome Seen through the Eyes of a Muslim German Latter-Day Flâneur - Margaret Littler: Between Romantic Love and War Machine: Liebesbrand - Michael Hofmann: Romantic Rebellion: Feridun Zaimoglu and Anti-bourgeois Tradition - Günter Senkel: Recherchen mit/Researching with Feridun Zaimoglu.
About the author
Tom Cheesman is a Reader in German at Swansea University. His books include Novels of Turkish German Settlement: Cosmopolite Fictions (2007) and the edited volumes Zafer ¿enocak (with Karin E. Ye¿ilada, 2003) and German Text Crimes (forthcoming, 2013).
Karin E. Ye¿ilada has published widely on Turkish and other migrants as both producers and objects of representation in German literature, film, television and cabaret. Her Poesie der Dritten Sprache (2012) is the first book on the poetry of the second Turkish German generation.
Report
«Die zehn Beiträge und das Interview sind durch zahlreiche Verweise ausgezeichnet miteinander verbunden und ergeben einen sehr fundierten, wissenschaftlichen Überblick über das bisherige literarische Schaffen Feridun Zaimoglus.»
(Frank Riedel, literaturkritik.de 10/2013)
«So besteht [...] das Verdienst der Herausgeber vor allem darin, ein grundlegendes und kompaktes Nachschlagewerk zu Feridun Zaimoglus literarischem Werk zusammengestellt zu haben, das für jeden, der sich mit diesem Autor auseinandersetzt, zur Pflichtlektüre werden wird.»
(Saniye Uysal Ünalan, Diyalog 2/2015)
