TY  - GEN
A1  - Anderson, David
T1  - The 'end of history' revisited : Christa Wolf's 'Kassandra' and Jeanette Winterson's 'Sexing the cherry'
T2  - ZfL Blog : Blog des Leibniz-Zentrums für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin
N2  - In his article "The End of History?", originally published in the journal "The National Interest" in Summer 1989, Frances Fukuyama argued that 'the triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systemic alternatives to Western liberalism.' It was in this respect that history had reached its 'end': the course of history in the sense of 'mankind's logical evolution' had arrived at 'the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government'. [...] A look at some of the historical fiction written in the 1980s might suggest ways out of this potential imaginative impasse, offering up alternative possibilities, or 'Gegenwelten', in place of the dispiriting spectacle of history-on-repeat. Fukuyama himself does not mention literature. In fact, the historical fiction of the 1980s reveals a space in which the meaning of 'history' is still very much contested and where the threat of the 'end of history' in its more obvious sense - in the form of nuclear war or climate apocalypse - emerges as a force that speaks powerfully to the anxiety of our present moment. Two evocative novels that have much to tell us in these respects are Christa Wolf's "Kassandra" and Jeanette Winterson's "Sexing the Cherry". Published in 1984 and 1989, these two texts challenged the idea of rational progress and  'mankind's logical evolution' by raising the prospect of a distinctive feminist poetics - of 'écriture féminine' and 'what it will do' as Hélène Cixous had put it in her 1975 essay "The Laugh of the Medusa". The 'Gegenwelten' they propose suggest ways out of the macho strait jacket of violence, destruction and impending nuclear war.
T3  - ZfL Blog : Blog des Leibniz-Zentrums für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin - 01.08.2022 
KW  - Wolf, Christa
KW  - Kassandra
KW  - Winterson, Jeannette
KW  - Sexing the cherry
KW  - Fukuyama, Francis
KW  - The end of history and the last man
KW  - Geschichtsphilosophie
KW  - Gegenwelten
Y1  - 2022
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/68960
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-689600
UR  - https://www.zflprojekte.de/zfl-blog/2022/08/01/david-anderson-the-end-of-history-revisited-christa-wolfs-kassandra-and-jeanette-wintersons-sexing-the-cherry/
SN  - 2748-5072
VL  - 2022
IS  - 01.08.2022
SP  - 1
EP  - 6
PB  - Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin
CY  - Berlin
ER  -