Constructing Authorship in the Work of Günter Grass: (Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs)

This book traces a longstanding concern with issues of authorship throughout the work of Günter Grass, Germany's best-known contemporary writer and public intellectual. Through detailed close-readings of all of his major literary works from 1970 onwards and careful analysis of his political writings from 1965 to 2005, it argues that Grass's tendency to insert clearly recognisable self-images into his literary texts represents a coherent and calculated reaction to his constant exposure in the media-led public sphere. It underlines the degree of play which has characterised Grass's relationship to this sphere and himself as part of it and explains how a concern with the very concept of authorship has conditioned the way his work as a whole has developed on both thematic and structural levels. The major achievement of this study is to develop a new interpretative paradigm for Grass's work. It explains for the first time how his playful tendency to manipulate his own authorial image conditions all levels of his texts and is equally manifest in literary and political realms.

About the Author :
Rebecca Braun was educated at St Edmund Hall and New College, 0xford, She was extraordinarily granted an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship in 2001 to begin her doctoral research on Günter Grass. She held temporary lectureships at St Edmund Hall, New College, and The University of Manchester before taking up a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at The University of Liverpool to begin new research on authors and the media in Germany from 1960 to the present.

Review :
Rebecca Braun's engaging and thoughtful book on the construction of authorship in selected works by Gunter Grass provides a series of closely argued, enlightening readings of texts ... Braun has produced a series of intriguing analyses that are both carefully argued and thought provoking. They will encourage many readers to return to Grass with fresh eyes. The strengths of Braun's work are its tight focus and argumentation, as well as a dense yet lucid writing style. Because of its original and wide-reaching approach, I recommend it to all scholars who have ever taken an interest in Grass's writing or visual art. [Braun] succeeds in doing something quite rare in literary studies, namely linking differentiated textual analysis to social conditions, without priviledging one over the other. an important contribution to Grass scholarship