"Revolutionary Subjects demonstrates that East and West German literary interests in Latin America coincided with debates about the political relevance of literature in the Cold War. Through a combination of close reading, contextual analysis, and careful theoretical work, Trnka examines textual instances of aesthetic solidarity, which, she argues, anticipated conceptual reorganizations of the world connoted by the transnational or the global" --
The author presents case studies to illustrate how transnational referents mediate first and second world political and cultural conflicts represented in German plays and novels about Latin America. Armed with the concept of aesthetic solidarity as a lens to view how political and literary actors embark on new paths across struggles and places, Trnka demonstrates how East and West German authors mobilized Latin American figures of revolutionary violence to literary-political ends. Six chapters are: geoculture, solidarity, and textual politics in East and West German writings about Latin America; the translator’s ghosts; alternative internationalisms and literary historical inversions; the task of decolonial thinking; a rhetoric of walking around; the limits of aesthetic solidarity. Annotation ©2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
Revolutionary Subjects demonstrates that East and West German literary interests in Latin America coincided with debates about the political relevance of literature in the Cold War. Through a combination of close reading, contextual analysis, and careful theoretical work, Trnka examines textual instances of aesthetic solidarity, which, she argues, anticipated conceptual reorganizations of the world connoted by the transnational or the global.
