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Space is important in all arts, that attempt at representing a certain mood and at suggesting the idea of embodiment. Space results from the presence of objects, of characters and environment, it is generated by and generates itself performative acts and structures. Starting from speech act and performativity theories relevant in literary and theatre studies, our article aims at an analysis of the space dimension in some texts of German authors writing in Romania. The main accent will be laid on the role of literary province reflecting both a sense of universality and of spacelessness.
In Germany, traffic planning still follows the tradition of modernist urban planning theory from the beginning of the 1930s and car-oriented city planning during the post-war period in West Germany. From a methodological perspective, the prevailing narrative is that traffic can be abstracted and modelled under laboratory conditions (in vitro) as a spatial movement process of individual neutral particles. The use of these laboratory experiments in traffic planning cannot be understood as a neutral application of experimental results, assumed to be true, in a variety of spatial contexts. Rather, it is an active practice of staging traffic according to a particular social interactionist paradigm.
According to this, traffic is staged through interventions in planning authorities as well as the practices of people on the streets. In order to describe these staging conduits, traffic is ontologically thought of as a social order that is continuously reproduced situationally through interactions, following Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel. To investigate the staging conduits empirically, an ethnographic-inspired field study was conducted at Willy-Brandt-Platz in Frankfurt am Main in May and June 2020. Through situational mapping and observation of social interactions (in situ), knowledge about the staging of social orders was generated.
These empirical findings are further embedded in debates that discuss traffic not only as a staging but also as an enactment of certain realities. Understanding planning practice as a political enactment, through which realities are not only described but also made, makes it possible for us to think and design alternative realities.
The four novels of Cătălin Dorian Florescu (Wunderzeit, Der kurze Weg nach Hause, Der blinde Masseur, Zaira) analysed here are interpreted in relation to the chronotope, a term developed by Michail Bachtin meaning the connectedness of time and space in narrative. Space knows two opposite dimensions in Florescu’s works: the West (Switzerland, USA) and the East (Romania). The Romanian space is represented by three different images corresponding to three different periods: Romania between the two world wars, during the communist period and after 1989. The main characters are Romanians who leave their country of origin during the communist period, hoping that they will find a better life in the West. After the revolt in 1989, the characters return to the space of their childhood, where they could find themselves and happiness once again. There are analyzed different aspects of the aesthetic space Romania: exotic space, space of discovery of oneself, spiritual space of traditions, but also space of disappointment and of perils. Space is in close connection with movement, the movement of the protagonists from one dimension to another, which is also the basis of the plot.
Rebecca Walkowitz’s observation that contemporary novels tend to be “born translated” involves the notion that they equally tend to be “born in motion”; they are often already, conceptually, on the road to faraway readers during their moments of conception. A first, more narrowly defined objective of my essay is to examine the narrative strategies used in Dave Eggers’s What Is the What (2007) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2007) that facilitate and respond to this dimension of motion in particular travels of memory. In a broader scope, this analysis will be embedded into an appraisal of the potentials of recent theorizing both in narratology (i.e. the study of narrative) and in memory studies to understand the dynamics at play in the reception of far-travelled narrative memory media. It is a central proposition of this essay that the two research fields share an amplitude of common concerns with regard to questions of reception and should therefore be brought into a close dialogue. The present study explores how some of these intersections between narratology and memory studies can be approached through the notions of “distance” and “proximity.”