Toward a “Minor Literature”? The Case of Ausländerliteratur in Postwar Germany

2003 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 61-84
Author(s):  
Rita Chin
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
World View ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
German Literature ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Minor Literature ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Postwar Germany ◽  
A Minor

In recent years, scholars of German literature have increasingly pointed to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's theory of “minor literature” as a crucial framework for understanding the development of minority cultural production in a variety of twentieth-century contexts (Teraoka, 1987; Suhr, 1989; Spector, 2000). Deleuze and Guattari propose that any minority group writing in a major language produces what they term minor literature, which has the capacity to destabilize and undermine the dominant language, culture, and discourse in which its authors operate (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986, pp. 16-27). This specific confluence of identities, texts, and locations, they suggest, calls into question the very foundations of the majority's world view and self-understanding. Deleuze and Guattari's model marks one of the first efforts by Western theorists to conceptualize cultural work that has traditionally been rendered invisible by classical literary writing and established categories of genre, style, and type.

The Open Society and the Democracy to Come: Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 352-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Baugh
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
The State ◽  
Open Society ◽  
Minor Literature ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The People ◽  
To Come ◽  
Polar Opposite ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Gain Access

In Bergsonism, Deleuze refers to Bergson's concept of an ‘open society’, which would be a ‘society of creators’ who gain access to the ‘open creative totality’ through acting and creating. Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy is oriented toward the goal of such an open society. This would be a democracy, but not in the sense of the rule of the actually existing people, but the rule of ‘the people to come,’ for in the actually existing situation, such a people is ‘lacking’. When the people becomes a society of creators, the result is a society open to the future, creativity and the new. Their openness and creative freedom is the polar opposite of the conformism and ‘herd mentality’ condemned by Deleuze and Nietzsche, a mentality which is the basis of all narrow nationalisms (of ethnicity, race, religion and creed). It is the freedom of creating and commanding, not the Kantian freedom to obey Reason and the State. This paper uses Bergson's The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, and Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: For a Minor Literature, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? to sketch Deleuze and Guattari's conception of the open society and of a democracy that remains ‘to come’.

scholarly journals Dlaczego literatura macedońska nie chce być literaturą mniejszą?

2018 ◽  
Vol 165 ◽  
pp. 401-411
Author(s):  
Jolanta Sujecka
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Minor Literature ◽  
World War ◽  
Minor Literatures ◽  
A Minor

Why does Macedonian literature not want to be a minor literature?The author takes alook at avery interesting and still under-investigated project for creating a Macedonian literature that emerged among the members of what was known as the Macedonian Literary Circle in Sofia 1938–1941, in the context of the concept of “minor literatures” proposed after World War II, in 1975, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The French researchers’ idea appears as aproposal that could build good solutions for the question of the Macedonian Literary Circle’s project being rooted in the Bulgarian linguistic and cultural context, aquestion that is avo­ided by both Macedonian and Bulgarian discourse.Зошто македонската книжевност не сакада биде споредна литература?Во мојата статија анализирам многу интересен проект на македонската литература што го формулираaт членовите на Македонскиот литературен кружок во Софија 1938–1941 воконтекст на концептот за споредни книжевности предлаган од француските истражувачи Жил Делез и Феликс Гуатари Gilles Deleuze, Félixa Guattari во 1975 година. Идејата на француските истражувачи може да биде добро решение на одлаганото од македонскиот и од бугарскиот дискурс прашање за бугарските корени на предлаганиот проект од членовите на Македонскиот литературен кружок.

The Archeology of Minor Literature

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 433-453
Author(s):  
Veronika Tuckerová
Keyword(s):  
German Literature ◽  
Minor Literature ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
At Home

This article takes a “genealogical” approach to the concept of minor literature. It argues that the concept of minor literature originated with the idea of “triple ghetto” that emerged in the Prague Czech-German-Jewish environment and was applied to explain the work of Kafka and his fellow Prague writers. Minor literature is the most famous application of the “triple ghetto” concept. A close reconsideration of Kafka’s German/Czech/Jewish Prague reveals interesting relations among several “small,” “minor” and “ultraminor” literatures, relationships that Deleuze and Guattari overlooked. The relationships between various literary entities in Prague extend beyond the binary positioning of “minor” and “major” inherent in the concept of minor literature. In addition to Kafka’s relationship to German literature, we need to consider Kafka’s relationship to the “small” Czech literature, the marginal “ultraminor” German and German Jewish and Czech Jewish literatures of his times, and perhaps most interestingly, to writers who were equally at home in German and Czech.

Complexity and Social Movement(s)

2005 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 187-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graeme Chesters ◽  
Ian Welsh
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Sense Making ◽  
Minor Literature ◽  
Analytical Challenge ◽  
Global Finance ◽  
Gregory Bateson ◽  
Computer Mediated ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Computer Mediated Communications

The rise of networked social movements contesting neo-liberal globalization and protesting the summits of global finance and governance organizations has posed an analytical challenge to social movement theorists and called into question the applicability to this global milieu of the familiar concepts and heuristics utilized in social movement studies. In this article, we argue that the self-defining alter-globalization movement(s) might instead be engaged with as an expression and effect of global complexity, and we draw upon a ‘minor’ literature in social movement studies that includes Gregory Bateson, Gilles Deleuze and Alberto Melucci to illustrate our claims. This article uses a Deleuzian reading of complexity to describe the phase space of the ‘movement of movements’, and its perturbation of global civil society through the iteration of sense-making processes (reflexive framing) and the exploration of singularities inhering in social movement ‘plateaux’. Those transnational gatherings, protests and social forums facilitated by computer-mediated communications and the advent of unprecedented mobility which constitute a ‘shadow realm’ that remains largely invisible to political exchange theories operating within the conceptual confines of the nation-state.

Rhizome

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Colebrook
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Basic Structure ◽  
Minor Literature ◽  
Distinct Mode ◽  
Multiple Points ◽  
Theory Of Language ◽  
A Minor

The concept of the rhizome was first articulated in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, published in French in 1975 and translated into English in 1986. Here the term emerges from a reading of Kafka’s description of movements in his novels and short stories, but it is also tied to a mode of reading and of composition. In Mille Plateaux (1980), translated into English as A Thousand Plateaus in 1987, the term has both a broad reference towards modes of thinking and analyzing that are nonhierarchical and decentered, and a more specifically literary sense of styles of writing. In A Thousand Plateaus, the term is introduced in order to describe a mode of composition that is distinct from the book, and a theory of language that is opposed to a basic structure, logic, or grammar from which variations develop. Languages and dialects do not emerge from a central grammar; instead, everything begins with variations of sound and sense. There is no universal grammar; every language has its distinct mode of growth. It is therefore illegitimate to talk of grammar “trees,” and far better to think of variation without a center. Rather than a linear development or progression, a rhizomatic text is composed of multiple points of entry. A rhizome is a lateral, decentered, proliferating, and interconnected web of relations and is therefore unlike the hierarchical (root, branch, offshoots) model of a tree.

Literature for Minors

2020 ◽  
pp. 92-134
Author(s):  
Kenneth B. Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Minor Literature ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Minor

Chapter 3 entertains the idea that children’s literature might also be called a literature for minors, and even a minor literature as conceptualized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Children are legally minors, but adults can be minors too, culturally if not also legally. Such an understanding of children’s literature broadens our sense of its purpose. The chapter begins with Walter Benjamin’s attention to childhood and children’s forms as a baseline for critical thinking about “minors.” It then traces the reception history of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, the Anglophone children’s classic that most closely approaches recognition as theory. Finally, the chapter explores the idea that some children’s literature functions as queer theory for kids, discussing a wide range of texts including A Series of Unfortunate Events. The chapter concludes with a reading of Alison Bechdel’s memoir Are You My Mother?, seemingly for adults but preoccupied with queer childhood.

scholarly journals Materiality, Language and the Production of Knowledge: Art, Subjectivity and Indigenous Ontology

2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Estelle Barrett
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
World View ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Indigenous Australian ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Subjective Agency ◽  
The Relationship

Since all theories of knowing deal with the being of subjects, objects, instruments and environments, they can be viewed as onto-epistemological.  This chapter examines key ideas that emerge from the work of Julia Kristeva – 'the speaking subject', 'materiality of language' and 'heterogeneity' – to demonstrate how ontology and epistemology are inextricably entwined in knowledge production. Kristeva also affirms both the agency of matter and  the dimension of human/subjective agency implicated in cultural production. This is contrasted with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s account creative practice. The article also draws on the artistic work of researcher-practitioner Brian Martin, and his account of the relationship between Indigenous Australian art and culture to demonstrate that in an Indigenous world view, the real, the immaterial, the imaginary and the representational occur concurrently.

Following the Contour of Concepts Toward a Minor Inquiry

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (9) ◽  
pp. 675-685 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa A. Mazzei
Keyword(s):  
Minor Literature ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Minor Inquiry

In this article, I describe how following the contour of concepts can enable a minor inquiry in which voice might be rethought as what Deleuze and Guattari called a “collective assemblage of enunciation.” Following the contour of Deleuze and Guattari’s “minor literature” and thinking voice as an assemblage, I both explain the characteristics of a minor literature and provide examples of the conditions for a minor inquiry. Mapping an enactment of a minor inquiry with examples from my previous work on voice, I conclude with what minor inquiry might look like as I experiment further with collective assemblages of enunciation.

scholarly journals 'Prender de gajo': sujetos trasplantados e imaginarios globales en Luisa Futoransky / 'Prender de gajo': transplanted subjects and global imaginaries in Luisa Futoransky

2017 ◽  
pp. 285
Author(s):  
Marta Sierra
Keyword(s):  
Literary Canon ◽  
Minor Literature ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Palabras Clave ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Poetic Memory ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Global And Local ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Luisa Futoransky

Resumen: La obra de Luisa Futoransky se construye como una “literatura menor” tal como la definen Deleuze y Guattari. Sus poemas y novelas emplean el collage como una forma de “subal-ternizar” el lenguaje literario a fin de cuestionar las grandes narrativas nacionales. Sus textos expresan un pensamiento de fronteras que está traspasado por inquietudes feministas. En el presente trabajo se analiza el modo en que la memoria transatlántica construye el lugar de la “subalternización” en los textos de Futoransky. Por medio de un análisis del uso del collage y otros mecanismos narrativos y poéticos, el trabajo propone leer la obra de Futoransky a partir de una estética desterri-torializadora que se caracteriza por: la disolución del sujeto, el uso del collage, la cita como un mecanismo posmoderno; la estética desfami-liarizadora, el humor y el artificio, y la memoria como la fuente de una estética trasatlántica. El trabajo analiza el modo en que Futoransky explora las tensiones en la relación entre memoria y lugar a partir de un análisis de las tensiones entre lo global y lo local. Palabras clave: Futoransky, literatura menor, subalternización, desterritorlización.Abstract: The works by Luisa Futoransky are representative of what Deleuze and Guattari define as a “minor literature”, a literature that questions the relationship between nation and literary canon. Her novels and poems use collage as a way to represent this “minor literature”, a medium to create a subaltern voice in her literature. Hers is a literature that lives in the borderlands, experiencing the border from a feminist perspective. In this essay, I propose a reading of Futoransky’s works from a transatlantic and subaltern perspective. Her aesthetic project breaks the bonds between language and territory. The main strategies analyzed here are: the dissolution of the subject, the use of collage and quotation as postmodern techniques to destabilize meaning, humor, and a poetic memory that challenges national borders. This paper analyzes how Futoransky explores the tensions between memory and place from the complexities of global and local dynamics. Keywords: Futoransky, Minor Literature, Subalternization, Deterritorialization.

A City of Betrayals: Irvine Welsh’s Minor Literature of Leith

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 25-34
Author(s):  
Julie Briand-Boyd
Keyword(s):  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Minor Literature ◽  
Crime Novel ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
Historical Relationship ◽  
A Minor ◽  
The City ◽  
Literary Experience

This article examines the representation of the city and communities of Edinburgh in Irvine Welsh’s works, more specifically his Trainspotting saga: Trainspotting (1993), Porno (2002), Skagboys (2012) and Dead Men’s Trousers (2018). While Welsh is an integral part of a broader literary tradition of the contemporary urban Scottish novel, which blends together the crime novel genre with the localised concerns of post-industrialism, gripping poverty, Thatcherite austerity, substance abuse and nagging questions of Scottish identity (gender, sexuality, class, nationhood, etc.), his depictions of the former port-town of Leith and its forgotten histories exposes Edinburgh as two distinctly separate and striated communities and geographies: one of opportunity and one of betrayal. Specifically, this essay reads Welsh through the literary, spatial and political theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari with regard to Leith’s contentious historical relationship with Edinburgh. In this analysis of Welsh’s Leith as a vernacular, rhizomatic and anti-institutional force, this essay hopes to illustrate how Welsh’s work redirects the popular notions of Scottish national identity and statehood toward a minor literature, a linguistic, political and historical divergence from the dominant Scottish literary experience

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