Iga Nowicz

My PhD research is concerned with contemporary German-language literary representation of the Yugoslav Wars, with special attention given to Peter Handke, Saša Stanišić and Marica Bodrožić. In my work, I draw on theories of literary multilingualism (Yildiz, Seyhan, Sturm-Trigonakis), studies of Balkanism (Todorova, Bakić-Hayden, Kovačević) and a variety of approaches derived from post-colonial, queer and gender studies.

Contrasting Handke’s controversial texts from the 1990s with later works by second-language writers, I consider the ways in which literary texts participate in a re-negotiation of German identity after the Wende and engage with complex issues of guilt, responsibility and (Western) interventionism. I highlight the ways in which second-language authors participate in the debates surrounding German memory culture, thus transforming the German national archive from within (Adelson).

Paying particular attention to multilingual strategies found in the texts by Stanišić and Bodrožić, I examine the intersection between linguistic, ethnic and sexual difference, exploring the potential of linguistically heterogeneous texts to undermine strict (ethnic, national) categories of self and other. I argue that multilingual texts widen the notion of German national identity post-unification, calling for a new, non-hierarchical and inclusive understanding of Germanness. This new concept of being German goes hand in hand with a new understanding of the German language, which can be inhabited by subjects whose links to Germany and German culture are based on affect rather than on ethnic or cultural origin.

At the same time, I consider the novels by Stanišić and Bodrožić as part of the growing body of post-Yugoslav literature which functions in a post-national literary space but which constantly revisits the difficult legacy of the Yugoslav conflict. In my close readings of such texts as Stanišić’s Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert and Bodrožić’s Kirschholz und alte Gefühle, I argue that the authors employ a range of textual strategies aimed at integrating an array of voices and subjectivities into their texts, depicting complex and sometimes conflicting patterns of victimhood resulting from the conflict. Simultaneously, the works reveal the problematic implications of turning the experience of war into a literary text and display a deep-seated anxiety about the communicability of traumatic experience.

My research is funded by the Arts and Humanities Scholarship awarded by King’s College London.

• Multilingualism
• Contemporary German literature
• Post-Yugoslav literature
• Representations of trauma
• Theories of voice and orality
• Authorship and literary celebrity
• Orientalism and post-colonial theories

I am a PhD student at King's College London and the Humboldt University in Berlin. Before coming to King's, I studied at the Universities of Oxford, Heidelberg and Cambridge, and worked as an English teacher, translator and interpreter from Polish and Russian. Since starting my PhD, I have taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses on German literature and culture, exophonic literature, and Bosnian narratives in German literature. I teach and publish in both German and English.