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WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES FEMINISM MAKE TO THE STUDY OF GERMAN LITERATURE? 1
Author(s) -
WatanabeO'Kelly Helen
Publication year - 1997
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.1468-0483.1997.tb01699.x
Subject(s) - german , feminism , syllabus , german literature , german studies , period (music) , canon , history , gender studies , sociology , literature , political science , law , art , aesthetics , archaeology
German departments in the United Kingdom often still have a traditional canon when it comes to their pre‐twentieth century syllabus. This came into being when the history of German literature was established at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. This ‘official’ German literature excluded women writers, even though in this period there was a great number of them, for reasons which the article discusses. The article then attempts to demonstrate what is lost if female voices are excluded from the canon. Attempts to extend it are, however, usually countered either by assumptions that women's writing must be of lesser quality than men's, simply because it is not canonical, or by assump tions that, because German literature is full of depictions of women, women's experience is thereby taken into account. The article questions these two responses and then goes on to posit that feminism will not only change and expand what students of German read but must also profoundly alter how canonical works and authors are taught. Ultimately, this will lead to a questioning of all working practices within academic institutions.

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