Overview

Using Germany as a national case study, this volume examines the historical genesis of precarity, its evolution from 19th-century industrial modernity to the present, and its reflections and reconfigurations in artistic production, in particular with relation to work, gender, and sexuality. “Precarity is everywhere now,” sociologist Pierre Bourdieu declared almost thirty years ago. Not only declining middle-class standards of living, but also debt, drug addiction, housing and food insecurity, depression, and “deaths of despair” are now being recognized as symptoms of the downward pull of social precarity. Although these and similar ills have been attributed to neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatization, and willful neglect of the common good, precarization has accompanied the booms and busts of industrial modernity from its beginnings. Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film explores how German and Austrian literature, film, and social history have engaged with social precarity, from the period of Romanticism and early industrialization to the present. The chapters in this volume deal with precarity as both an objective phenomenon reflected in literary and filmic representations and as a subjective phenomenon that gives these representations their particular shape. Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film opens new critical perspectives on diverse forms of lived precarity and their creative manifestations by reflecting on the history of capitalist modernity from the vantage points of weakness, vulnerability, marginality, impoverishment, and otherness.

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9781501391477

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Reviews

In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary volume, the editors and contributors shed new light on contemporary precarity by tracing its evolution from the beginning of industrialization. The book stands out for its focus on theories and aesthetic practices of resistance, from Romantic anti-capitalism through Weimar-era queer autobiography up to East German documentaries and contemporary literature and film, and it makes significant contributions to our understanding of precarity and its representations. * Patrick Greaney, Professor of German and Humanities, University of Colorado Boulder., USA * 'Precarity' has become a term of art in social and cultural criticism, but the angle it brings to the discussion hasn’t always been clear. Duvernoy, Olson, and Plass’s volume fills readers in on that angle, making a case for attending to representations of the downtrodden more ecumenical than those of only industrial immiseration. Without polemicizing against a Marxist tradition, the volume’s essays demonstrate the value of the subjectively and descriptively attuned term 'precarity' for uncovering depictions of personal, contingent, and emotional vulnerabilities often overlooked by normative or teleological approaches. The volume casts new light on canonical as well as neglected works from romanticism and modernism to contemporary film and literature. * Benjamin Robinson, Associate Professor of Germanic Studies and Chair, Indiana University, USA * In this timely and sorely needed volume, rich historical depth is added to the often all-too-presentist application of 'precarity' to recent works of art, laying bare the deep connection between precarity and discourses on and representations of 'the poor' since 1800. Within a rigorous theoretical framework of critical theory, Marxism, gender theory, and the history of work and labor, these essays explore – via precarity – ongoing dispossessions, forms of subjectivation, and forms of social (non-)relations, bringing agency and utopian desires to the fore. * Elke Siegel, Associate Professor of German Studies and Chair, Cornell University, USA *

Author Information

Sophie Duvernoy holds a PhD in German from Yale University, USA, and is a translator in Berlin, Germany. Karsten Olson is Lecturer of German Studies at the University of North Carolina Asheville, USA. Ulrich Plass is Professor of Letters and German Studies at Wesleyan University, USA.

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