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Writing rape, troping history : story, plot, and ethical reading in Julia Franck's 'Die Mittagsfrau' (2007)
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Stone, Katherine (2018) Writing rape, troping history : story, plot, and ethical reading in Julia Franck's 'Die Mittagsfrau' (2007). German Quarterly, 91 (2). pp. 153-169. doi:10.1111/gequ.12065
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12065
Abstract
This article examines the rhetorical function of sexual violence in Julia Franck’s novel 'Die Mittagsfrau' (2007), which unflinchingly relates the degradations to which the protagonist is subjected from infancy: sexual exploitation by her sister; psychological abuse at the hands of her mother; sexual harassment by a family friend; abuse by her eventual husband; marginalization as a “Mischling” in the Third Reich; gang rape by Soviet soldiers. Franck extensively and graphically describes individual episodes of sexual harrassment within chapters that span several years. This narrative excess warrants a “hysterical reading” that magnifies textual details in order to demonstrate the link between representations of sexual violence and wider patterns of structural and symbolic violence. The gaps and tensions that emerge as the narrative shifts between the mimetic and tropological levels provide the basis for a broader exploration of the ethics of reading and the ethics of representing sexual violence more generally.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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| Subjects: | P Language and Literature > PT Germanic literature | ||||||||
| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > School of Modern Languages and Cultures > German Studies | ||||||||
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Franck, Julia -- Criticism and interpretation, Rape in literature -- Germany | ||||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | German Quarterly | ||||||||
| Publisher: | Wiley Online Library | ||||||||
| ISSN: | 0016-8831 | ||||||||
| Official Date: | 23 April 2018 | ||||||||
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| Volume: | 91 | ||||||||
| Number: | 2 | ||||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 153-169 | ||||||||
| DOI: | 10.1111/gequ.12065 | ||||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||||
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