“Stay tuned” has been the tagline for “Tages-Anzeiger” for a long time, but in 2019 it will be the turn of the newspaper itself: Under the hashtag #dichterdran, there is a dirty storm after an old man reviews a young writer’s novel. Bloggers on Twitter turn the tables and write about poets like the critic about the author: “No wonder the brilliant Ingeborg Bachmann couldn’t stand Max Frisch crying in the long run,” she says. Or: “You look great for your age, Chapo! Can you tell us the three must-have personal care products, Frank Schatzing? »
Hamburg literary scholar Nicole Seifert, 49, described this hilarious anecdote in her recently published book Women’s Literature. It is just one example that has been cited and sheds light on how men have ignored, or at least ignored, the literary achievements of women writers for centuries. The main critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1920-2013) was of the serious opinion that women can only write poetry – their creative power is not enough for novels.
Current novelists such as Eva Minas (51), Sylvia Choi (47) and Julie Zh (47) lie to him. The latter has been #1 on Spiegel’s bestseller list for months now, so it’s been well received by readers as well. And in this country, Kristen Brand (48), Petra Ivanov (54) and Sylvia Gucci (63) are in the top ten. But Seifert warns: “Despite the claim that women writers are in progress, the proportion of authors in literary publishing house programs is still about two-thirds—just as their proportion in reviews in the features section.”
Crossing out women – that’s how radical the book cover is. why? Because veteran editor Seifert considers the term “women’s literature” inappropriate: it serves only to disparage, after all, there is also no equivalent “men’s literature.” But don’t women write differently? “From an aesthetic point of view, this is not the case, there has long been consensus in literary studies,” Seifert says. The situation is different when it comes to the question of the content of women’s writing, “precisely because women live and still live in completely different conditions than men.”
“Undervalued, forgotten, rediscovered,” Seifert calls out her book in the subtitle. Because, contrary to the popular assertion that there were no female authors in the past, their works simply do not find a place in the literary canon. Seifert: “The good news is: As women’s books are excluded from literary history, there is an incredible amount to be discovered in the past.” On her blog Night and Day, she’s only treated female writers for years—without any health effects, she notes with a wink.
Nicole Seifert, “Women’s Literature – Understated, Forgotten, Rediscovered”, Keppenhair & Wich
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