In the face of current socio-political developments, how can authors take a literary stand? This is the guiding question behind the volume Standortbestimmungen. Literarische Positionierungen der Gegenwart, co-edited by Barbara Bausch (Research Area 4: Literary Currencies) and Julia Weber, which is dedicated to contemporary texts that explore the possibilities of engagement and participation in terms of personal, political and aesthetic positioning. The collection focuses on analysing formal strategies of self-positioning that produce new aesthetics and forms of writing from a position of (supposed) marginality.

Standortbestimmungen marks the relaunch of Edition AVL with BerlinUP – Berlin Universities Publishing, the non-profit, open-access publishing house established by the Berlin University Alliance (BUA). Founded by the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature (Freie Universität Berlin), it is edited by Michael Auer, Michael Gamper (Research Area 4), Esther von der Osten, Susanne Strätling (Research Area 4) and Julia Weber.

Contributions by Cluster members:

For the collection, Susanne Strätling has focussed on "Das Recht auf Sprache. Iryna Shuvalovas Kriegsgedicht wenn man mich nicht tötet". Her contribution sheds light on the prerequisites for positioning oneself in such a manner, emphasising that in order to do so, one must first and foremost be able to occupy a standpoint within a given discursive field. In her engagement with Iryna Shuvalova's war poem if I am not being killed, composed in 2022 in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Strätling explores the potentials of communicative processes in spaces where the right to articulate an opinion is contested. In so doing, she discusses the mechanisms of selection and exclusion through which permission to speak is regulated, and asks how censorship can open up zones of new, sometimes excessive modes of speech.

In her paper "Für ein interessiertes Wohlgefallen. Anmerkungen zu diskriminierenden und rassistischen Strukturen im Umgang mit (digitaler) Literatur", Nina Tolksdorf (Research Area 2: Travelling Matters) points out that innovative forms of writing and publication often emerge in scenarios where the right to speak and be heard is being withheld. Focusing on texts published (initially or primarily) in the digital realm – pieces of writing whose literary quality is habitually questioned in the arts pages – she argues that the exclusion of political and activist voices from the canon is by no means a coincidence; rather, Tolksdorf contends, the insistence on – supposedly – purely aesthetic criteria is in fact an expression of discriminatory practices that took root during the Enlightenment and continue to have a major impact on current discourses. Her chapter also engages with (digital) literary strategies of community building by authors such as Marina Weisband, Sarah Berger and Christiane Frohmann, who between them have established a pioneering aesthetics of networked multiplicity.

With "Situiert schreiben, situiert lesen. Dorothee Elmigers Aus der Zuckerfabrik als Konstellation", Barbara Bausch examines in her own chapter Elmigers genre-hybrid prose book from 2020 by addressing it as a re-evaluation of political writing that highlights both the positioning of the writing subject and that of the reader. As Bausch argues, Elmiger's work represents a distinct manifestation of autofictional writing that is not primarily based on the play with authenticity effects – instead, it establishes a situated form of literary production in order to exhibit the inherent situatedness of all writing. The autofictional ego, which stages itself as a reader and as a collector of material, resists a fixed and fixating positioning by constantly re-situating itself in its relationship to people, things, times and spaces. Accordingly, the book's open textual form is conceptualised through the metaphor of the constellation, that is, as a collection of loose elements that are grouped into an ensemble by a subject that writes as it reads. In a further step, the constellation as a literary technique is interpreted as a challenge directed at the readers of Aus der Zuckerfabrik – an invitation to adopt a perspective, to actively place themselves in a relationship to the text and the material gathered therein.

 

Barbara Bausch and Julia Weber (Eds.). Standortbestimmungen. Literarische Positionierung in der Gegenwart. Edition AVL 01, Berlin: Berlin Universities Publishing 2025. (Open Access)