The Identity Politics of Uncertainty: Eva Menasse’s Quasikristalle (2013)

This article argues, through a close reading of Eva Menasse’s Quasikristalle [Quasicrystals] (2013), that Menasse can be more productively viewed as a minority author, rather than as a minor author. The concept of minority authorship proposed here with reference to Menasse is in dialogue with but departs significantly from the conception of minor literature that Deleuze and Guattari adapted from Kafka’s writings on the literatures of smaller nations and communities. More specifically, this article proposes that we understand the notion of “minority” in contemporary literature as a contextual feature relating to authors’ public identities, that is, the ways in which authors represent themselves, are marketed and received, rather than an innate political and linguistic feature of literary texts. By reading Menasse’s feminist op-eds and her essays on the cultural differences between (Jewish) Vienna and Berlin alongside Quasikristalle, with its focus on women’s lives and relationships on the one hand, and the experiences of Austrian Jewish emigres in Germany on the other, the article shows that minority literature can be both mainstream and political, both explicit about its concerns and subtle in its undermining of stereotypes about minority identities. Tweetable Abstract: This article reads Menasse’s Quasikristalle as minority literature, rather than as minor literature in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense.