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Der text als soundtrack -der autor als DJ: Thomas Meineckes romane im fadenkreuz von postmoderne und postkolonialismus

Florence A Feiereisen, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Abstract

The works of author, musician, and disc jockey Thomas Meinecke (*1955), both in content and in form, dismantle previously maintained conceptions of authorship, readership, and the literary text. My dissertation has two goals: firstly, the introduction of Meinecke and his literary works at the intersection of postmodernist and postcolonial debates, music and literature, fiction and academic theory; secondly, a cultural studies analysis of his novels The Church of John F. Kennedy (1996), Tomboy (1998), Hellblau (2001) and Musik (2004), with special consideration paid to identity formation within postmodern and postcolonial frameworks. By using a cultural studies approach, I deconstruct Meinecke's literary sampling, mixing, and remixing of national, sexual, and gender identities; ethnicity, and race. To position his works within German contemporary pop literature, I compare Meinecke's works to those of his colleagues at Suhrkamp and in the DJ scene, namely Andreas Neumeister (Angela Davis löscht ihre Webseite, 2002) and Rainald Goetz (Rave, 1998). By reading his methods of text production as literary DJ-techniques (reminiscent of sampling, scratching, and remixing in the DJ culture), I define his works as sound literature, critically examining the analogies text/soundtrack, quotation/sample, and author/DJ. As opposed to Montage and Cut-up, the concept of literary sampling of pre-existing materials opens up the postmodern discourse on intellectual property and plagiarism in literature and necessitates a close analysis of the political function of Meinecke's literary sampling. I also observe emerging literary rhythms and analyze the way in which they facilitate interaction among author, reader, and texts. In my analysis of this reconfiguration of authorship and readership, the reader has more power than initially assumed: by using reception theory, I argue that the death of the author does not result in the rebirth of the reader but leads to the notion of the reader as a DJ.

Subject Area

Germanic literature

Recommended Citation

Feiereisen, Florence A, "Der text als soundtrack -der autor als DJ: Thomas Meineckes romane im fadenkreuz von postmoderne und postkolonialismus" (2007). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI3275765.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3275765

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