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Chapter 6 - Post-1945 Realisms

from Part I - The Realist Novel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2025

Paul Stasi
Affiliation:
University of Albany
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Summary

Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries deploys transnational migrant Gesine Cresspahl as a protagonist-narrator to retell the story of her life, family, and national home(s) from the perspective of New York City in 1967–1968. Newly translated into English in its entirety by Damion Searls, Johnson’s modern epic reconstitutes realist storytelling in the wake of catastrophe. This chapter accounts for Anniversaries’ quest for epic truth and human justice amid Johnson’s literary registration of the rise and fall of German Nazism, the ensuing Cold War disorder, and the travails of New York city social life. Repurposing techniques of realist and modernist narration, scrutinizing the world’s course anno 1968 via a multilingual, multipolar, and multi-scalar spatial and temporal mapping as vast as it is intricate, Johnson and Cresspahl fictionally combine efforts to remember and mourn past atrocities as well as stake out tenable lives in the narrated present. Anniversaries’ fanciful and self-aware, irrealist but verifiable, traumatized yet searching storytelling builds up and elaborates a critical counter-publicity capable of remediating modernity’s interrelated crises in their long durée. Exemplifying modern realism’s undiminished tasks, Anniversaries grants readers and New World literature an immense and resourceful compendium for navigating the twenty-first century.

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Type
Chapter
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Realism and the Novel
A Global History
, pp. 86 - 102
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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