Resisting Texts : Exploring Positions in a Complex Relationship

Resisting Texts offers twelve studies that analyse the complex dynamics of textual resistance, exploring fiction’s fundamental potential to resist against realities – and the way reality may resist against fictions. Grouped into four sections, the articles (1) focus on how fictional texts resist the dynamics of history by consciously rewriting it; (2) explore how texts resist the readers’ desire to witness an authentic act of origin and instead perform the past’s resistance against recovery; (3) describe cultural institutions and their rhetoric of resistance against mainstream views that nevertheless has potential for productive resistance go unused; and (4) offer new approaches to literary texts that are usually read as resisting a specific ideology but can be shown to resist in a more complex way. The ‘resisting texts’ in these studies include works by Thomas Bernhard, António Botto, Daniil Charms, Allen Ginsberg, Toni Morrison, Octavio Paz, W.G. Sebald, and Virginia Woolf.

Brigitte Rath organized the summer school Resisting Texts during her time as Academic Coordinator of the international PhD Programme in Literature at LMU Munich. She teaches now at the University of Innsbruck.
Stefan Schukowski is finishing his dissertation at the PhD Programme in Literature and will be teaching at the University of Erlangen starting in 2011.