The first peculiarities arise when the topic is to be named. On the title page of Nicole Seifert’s book “Women Literature”, for example, the first word is crossed out. Because the terminology becomes a nuisance to the extent that “men’s literature” would not be a meaningful category. So is the situation: there is the Literature in which women only played an exceptional role as authors and an alternative literary history in which for centuries there was literature by women, especially for women. Mainly, however, there is a social advance, less in literary life than accelerated by movements like “Me Too”, which no longer accepts this kind of cultural dominance and submission as normal.
However, one does not come to the networks of meanings in men’s literature simply through declarations of will. You have to make room in the canon and consider: Which books have so far been underestimated? Who wrote literary and who lacked the means to put time, nerves and their civic reputation at risk through artistic ambitions?
Such questions put the old literary canon up for debate, and in doing so, authors of earlier times who were previously unknown become important, which then also changes the interests of contemporary literature. Something like this has been happening for a while with black literature in the United States and the authors of formerly colonized countries in the world. And with the books of women, which is why it can make temporary sense to categorize them against the actual political intentions and, as it is often said, “make them visible”.
Nicole Seifert: Women Literature. Devalued, forgotten, rediscovered. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2021. 217 pages, 18 euros.
The literary scholar and operator of the blog gives an overview of the current state of debate “Night and day”, Nicole Seifert, in “Women Literature. Devalued, Forgotten, Rediscovered”. Although there are some things that would be objectionable to this book. Not only the honest use of the first person plural when Seifert exposes “our completely lopsided notions of gender norms”, “to which we are so used that we consider them correct and important, normal and unchangeable”. Who is this “we”? Is it the author of this book of all things?
Seifert goes back to the history of the working conditions of women writers and their motives in such a fundamentally seminar-like manner that readers of famous books on the subject, such as Silvia Bovenschen, Gisela von Wysocki or Elisabeth Bronfen may wonder why they are detained. Hasn’t the controversy in feminist literary criticism already reached this point? Or further?
Obviously, the work on the canon is happening in spurts, and every generation has to come up with some new insights – over and over again the backlashes that have repeatedly harmed equality in the meantime. And many numbers and examples that Nicole Seifert gives for how books by women and men are measured to different degrees, like women authors ad personam Have to be treated condescendingly, while men are deprived of everything possible as aesthetic tactics, are from the past few years, so current. Your warning is also needed that the recently effective intention of establishing gender parity in proofreading, editorial offices and juries – and thus perhaps also in publishing programs, in reviews and among literary award winners – can quickly fade again.
Marlene Streeruwitz: Gender. Number. Case. Lectures 2021. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2021. 139 pages, 22 euros.
The most glaring example of the fact that the attention boom for women in art does nothing to counter misogyny, the Austrian writer Marlene Streeruwitz tells in a poetics lecture: “In the dispute about my text for the theater play Mar-a-Lago. Or. Neuschwanstein. the director of the Berliner Ensemble told me that he could look for a younger feminist for such a feminist outlier if I didn’t agree with the deletions he asked for. This phone call was only 3 years ago. “
The millennia-old patriarchy will not be able to be fought back that quickly. If, however, there has been progress recently, it is that there is a lot of talk about sexism and equal treatment, everywhere and as a matter of course. Ten years ago you could still see that in discussions about the liter canon, the question “And which women?” There was silence. It was badly bothered. And was politely ignored with the question of whether Rainald Goetz or rather Daniel Kehlmann … Today you can feel almost exclusively diligence when it comes to equipping reading lists with books by women.
Elke Heidenreich: This way it goes! Through life with books by women. Eisele, Munich 2021. 192 pages, 26 euros.
So it’s good that Elke Heidenreich, who is always expressly attentive to readers’ wishes, has now published an autobiographical essay entitled “Here it goes! With books by women through life”. With her own enthusiastic exclamation marks, she tells of herself as a reader of the fried fish literature of the 1950s, of Selma Lagerlöf, Françoise Sagan, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Annie Ernaux.
The book becomes exciting where it goes beyond the scope, because it doesn’t work without Hans Christian Andersen and Gottfried Benn, such a reading life. As if to compensate for this, the last chapter, under the heading “Men”, names books by women, which Heidenreich powerfully believes to be unattainable in men’s books. While Nicole Seifert assures that women’s books are by no means substantially better, only the conditions under which they write are worse.
Virginia Woolf: Freedom is just the beginning. Self-confidence thoughts. Translated from the English by Isabel Bogdan, with illustrations by Aino-Maija Metsola. Arche, Zurich / Hamburg 2021. 40 pages, 10 euros.
The minimum requirement under these conditions is the much-cited by Virginia Woolf: “A woman needs five hundred (pounds) a year and a room of her own in order to write,” says her essay “A Room of One’s Own”. A bilingual gift edition of her speech “Professions for Women” has just been published in which she says: “But this freedom is just the beginning; the room is yours, but it is still empty.” The canon question is, “Who will you share it with and under what conditions?”
There would be material for an internal discussion about who should be included in the canon. The critics Verena Auffermann, Julia Encke, Ursula März, Elke Schmitter and Gunhild Kübler, who died in November, have just reissued their anthology with portraits of authors from 2009, a valuable reference work: at that time there were 99 articles, now there are only 100, but they have rearranged. That Maya Angelou, Virginie Despentes, Sibylle Berg and others joined them – very right! But when you see that Fanny zu Reventlow, Anaïs Nin, Emine Sevgi Özdamar and a few more are missing now, you shudder. Sort out again?
Verena Auffermann, Julia Encke, Gunhild Kübler, Ursula März, Elke Schmitter: 100 female authors in portraits. From Atwood to Sappho, from Adichie to Zeh. Piper, Munich 2021. 585 pages, 24 euros.
The canon has outlived itself anyway, says Marlene Streeruwitz in her lecture “Gender. Number. Case.” Overruled by cultural turn, which is also held responsible for the normative fragmentation of western societies: “The artistic directors now committed to the cultural turns were forced into commercialization through budget savings. The result was only a surface.” Was it the same? cultural turnwho has equipped gender theory and feminist science with exactly the tools that today help to tinker with old power structures and deflate the canon? Unfortunately, the good old dialectic of the Enlightenment is not a male domain either.