Christa Wolf: A Companion

The volume Christa Wolf: A Companion, edited by Sonja Klocke and Jennifer Hosek, includes work by a number of WiGgies!

Interest in Christa Wolf continues to grow. Her classics are being reprinted and new titles are appearing posthumously, becoming bestsellers, and being translated. Energetic scholarly debates engage well-known aesthetic and political issues that the public intellectual herself fore-fronted. This broad-ranging introduction to the author, her work and times builds upon and moves beyond such foundational interpretative frameworks by articulating the global relevance of Wolf’s oeuvre today, also for non-German readers. Thus, it brings East German culture alive to students, teachers, scholars and the general public by connecting the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the lived experiences of its citizens to nations and cultures around the world. The collection focuses on topical matters including the search for authenticity, agency, race, cosmopolitanism, gender, environmentalism, geopolitics, war, and memory debates, as well as movie adaptations and Wolf’s film work with DEFA, marketing, and international reception. Our contributions – by senior and emerging scholars from across the globe – emphasize Wolf’s position as an author of world literature and an important critical voice in the 21st century.

Contents

Introduction: Reading Christa Wolf in the Twenty-First Century
Klocke, Sonja E. / Hosek, Jennifer R.

Modernity and the City in Christa Wolf’s Oeuvre of the 1960s
Swope, Curtis

Narrative Topographies in Christa Wolf’s Oeuvre
Criser, Regine

The Gendered Reception of Christa Wolf
Kuhn, Anna K.

Unearthing a Post-Humanist Ecological Socialism in Christa Wolf’s ‘Selbstversuch’, Kassandra and Störfall
Janson, Deborah

Nature, Power and Literature: Rereading Christa Wolf’s Störfall. Nachrichten eines Tages as ‘Ecological Force’ in Times of Climate Crisis
Mering, Sabine von

Literature and Visual Art in Christa Wolf’s Sommerstück (1989) and Was bleibt (1990)
Skare, Roswitha

Learning from the Underground: Christa Wolf and the Fourth Generation of GDR Writers
Horakova, Anna

From Pan-German Cosmopolitanism to Nostalgic National Insularity: A Comparative Study of Christa Wolf’s Kassandra and Medea
Pizer, John

Christa Wolf’s Trouble with Race
Weber, Beverly M.

Towards a Late Style? Christa Wolf on Old Age, Death and Creativity in Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud
Smale, Catherine

The Protocol of Barriers to Thinking? Wolf’s Moskauer Tagebücher. Wer wir sind und wer wir waren (2014)
Dahlke, Birgit

Translating Subjective Authenticity from Christa T. to Stadt der Engel and August: Re-presenting Christa Wolf’s Subaltern Voice
Summers, Caroline

From Political-Realistic Reading to Multiperspectival Understanding: The Reception of Christa Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel in China
Chen, Yutian / Zhang, Fan

Reading Christa Wolf in Socialist Vietnam
Trinh, Huynh Mai

Christa Wolf: A Select Bibliography
Klocke, Sonja E.