Download or read book Border Poetics written by Karolina May-Chu and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Borders can be literal and figurative, but their effects are always real. The border between what is today Germany and Poland has been drawn multiple times over the past centuries. While these changes often did not align with people's ethnic, local, or personal attachments, they did not necessarily generate animosities until the rise of nationalism in the modern period. Thus, for much of the twentieth century, the border was narratively constructed as a dividing line. The situation changed with the end of the Cold War, and narratives after 1989 often articulate the borderland as a site of contact and of mixing. However, at times writers and artists go beyond this transnational perspective. This dissertation argues that some German and Polish border narratives express entangled histories and "defocalized" identities by engaging in a practice of radical de-bordering and reshuffling of border constellations. To analyze such phenomena, I adapt the concept of "border poetics" to denote a narrative and cultural practice that places historically and socially situated borders and border experiences in relation with figurative boundaries. This means that "real" borderlands become staging grounds for symbolic border crossings that represent fundamentally human experiences or questions of identity, e.g., the border between life and death, dream and reality, and interrogations of gender, race, or ethnicity. Because border poetics rests on the same productive tension between the particular and the universal that also drives cosmopolitanism, I argue for viewing border poetics as an idiom of the cosmopolitan imagination. Instead of foregrounding border poetics as an analytical tool, my study stresses that it is a practice. In five chapters, I locate the practice in the broader history of German-Polish relations; map the phenomenon in theoretical terms by drawing on scholarship in the fields of border studies, cosmopolitanism, and world literature; and interrogate and expand the theoretical framework by testing it on specific narratives. The analysis of select literary and cultural texts focuses on story, discourse, and performance, and I show that these narratives engage in transborder conversations that do not ignore or homogenize difference, but examine it critically and imagine border spaces in new ways