Literature and literary exploration have been delving into topographies and the ideologies they convey for some time now. Our day of studies presents an excellent opportunity to examine the places and representations in literary discourse, focusing on their limits and modes of overcoming, which are initially associated with boundaries. These boundaries remain a constant concern in German-language literature, even after reunification.
These transcendences also encompass the concepts of text and literary discourse. Through an individualized and subjective poetics, literary discourse continually constructs and reconstructs itself, inventing its modes of self-reflection. These moments of introspection, characterized by theory-infused commentary, witness fiction looking at itself, examining its conception, exceeding its limits, and turning toward an immediate past. This past includes the function of the author, their role as director, their aesthetics, and language in its fullness before verbal ellipsis.
The mentioned limits and topographies also include third spaces, transition places, heterotopias that utopia erects into spaces of dreams and subversion against established order. In this unrestrained imagination, literature reinvents its world to denounce all forms of "knowledge" and authoritarian discourse, whether emanating from the sciences, metadiscourse, or recurring themes in German-language literature of the 80s.
In our approach, the theory of the carnivalesque-comic by Mikhail Bakhtin and Michel Foucault's discourse analysis theory play a crucial role, especially through the concept of pre-discourse. Feminist theories and a postcolonial perspective remain at the core of our concerns, emphasizing the importance of valuing peripheries and margins. It is a constant deconstruction that questions reflexes of dominance that human history incessantly reinvents.
The mentioned third spaces also encompass interculturality. Through encounters with the Other, they reveal not only this "Other-self" but also a "Self as another." In these spaces, a complex weave of mutual understanding and cultural enrichment emerges.