Premium
Anxiety and the Archive: Constructing Value and Identity in the Pop‐Lit Novels Soloalbum and Generation Golf
Author(s) -
Pye Gillian
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
german life and letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 12
eISSN - 1468-0483
pISSN - 0016-8777
DOI - 10.1111/j.0016-8777.2006.00352.x
Subject(s) - german , mainstream , identity (music) , value (mathematics) , popular culture , aesthetics , sociology , german culture , cultural identity , history , literature , art , media studies , law , social science , political science , computer science , negotiation , archaeology , machine learning
Recently the many angry responses in the German press provoked by examples of so‐called pop literature have testified to the challenge this writing presents to traditional conceptions of the cultural archive. By toying with the notions of transience and durability, the pop‐lit pose raises questions about the boundary between rubbish and the perennially valuable. Moreover, by focusing on the now as it becomes history –‘gerade, eben, jetzt’– it questions the relationship of literature to the past, reflecting a post‐memory generation's obsession with archiving the present. Florian Ilies's Generation Golf (2000) and Benjamin von Stuckrad Barre's Soloalbum (1998) are high‐profile examples of mainstream German pop literature of the late nineties. Critical commentators have tended to write off these texts as trash without assessing them on their own terms. This discussion considers Ilies's and von Stuckrad‐Barre's texts as provocative impulses which challenge literature to deal with the impact of consumer culture on the construction of identity.