Necessary entanglements

Whereas questions of gender already play a significant role within German Literary Criticism, postcolonial theories have attracted attention only recently. Taking this into account the research projects aims to develop a specific methodology and reading strategy that ties up to gender theories and postcolonial theories rendering the latter useful for German Literary Criticism. This goal is being pursued in a threefold way: In a first step the reception of postcolonial theories within German Literary Criticism will be documented, analyzed and, finally, be compared with the reception of postcolonial theories within other philologies. The second part of the research project analyzes the theoretical and methodological potentials of Gender Studies and Postcolonial Studies for German Literary Criticism and outlines possible areas of application. Starting from the thesis of an immanent entanglement of sexual and cultural difference the project tries to rethink the central concepts of gender-oriented and postcolonial approaches, as, for example, alterity, hybridity, orientalism, third space, in order to employ them - in the sense of a genuine translation effort - for German Literary Criticism. In the third part of the project the theoretical and methodological considerations are reflected by exemplary readings of paradigmatic literary texts and put to the test by means of the reading strategies developed in the second part. Under the title "Orientalisms around 1900" the main period of the German and the Austro-Hungarian colonial history will be under investigation. The aim is to sketch out the explicitly and implicitly thematized connections between patriarchal and colonial discourses of power as well as to make the construction and production of gender identities and cultural identities readable within the texts themselves.