Revolting Families: Toxic Intimacy, Private Politics, and Literary Realisms in the German Sixties by Carrie Smith-Prei (review)

Reviewed by: Revolting Families: Toxic Intimacy, Private Politics, and Literary Realisms in the German Sixties by Carrie Smith-Prei Jennifer Ruth Hosek Revolting Families: Toxic Intimacy, Private Politics, and Literary Realisms in the German Sixties. By Carrie Smith-Prei. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Pp. 204. Cloth $44.45. E-Book $42.23. ISBN 978-1442646377. Carrie Smith-Prei’s Revolting Families: Toxic Intimacy, Private Politics, and Literary Realisms in the German Sixties lays out a cogent, historicized, and theoretically grounded argument that “literary corporeal negativity” can engender sociopolitical resistance. The study insists that such representations impulse critique in readers by demonstrating the radically personal and public character of the body and by destabilizing the beauty-goodness axiom that dominated the West German imaginary (and that largely remains dominant today). To make the case for the persuasive force of literary corporeal negativity, Smith-Prei analyses several texts by four West German [End Page 456] authors: Dieter Wellershoff, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Gisela Elsner, and Renate Rasp. Her analysis contextualizes their aesthetics and themes in contemporary philosophical and social debates of the long 1960s while utilizing noncontemporaneous theory—notably that of Sianna Ngai, Julia Kristeva, and Michel Foucault—to further illuminate the new realist and black realist texts of these then-emergent writers. A solid portion of her meaty introduction carefully charts articulations of the slippery term realism to arrive at a working definition for her subsequent analysis. Here, Smith-Prei draws extensively from Dieter Wellershoff, who in his role as editor at Kiepenheuer and Witsch coined the term “new realism” in relation to Brinkmann’s literary production. Writing of the texts in her investigation, Smith-Prei states, “beginning from the assumption that 1960s literary realism reflects or engages with the individual’s everyday private experiences, these texts portray reality not mimetically, but instead sensually and emotionally, and thus as formulated and experienced by the body. This body includes textual bodies and the reader’s body” (13). Drawing on the local term “new realism” as the basis of her analytic “blueprint,” Smith-Prei notes that Wellershoff’s moniker was not prescriptive, but rather descriptive of a collection of writing that focuses on details of the subjective and personal everyday. The variant of black realism employs more satire and hyperbolic ugliness and may produce unease in readers, inviting them to “resist normativity through refusal, as is the case with Elsner’s novel, or passivity, in Rasp’s text” (103). For Smith-Prei, new realist and black realist authors are simultaneously of their times and unique within them. These writing modes expanded within the milieu of political engagement that characterized 1960s social movements. For instance, from early in the decade, many social actors were rethinking what was understood as the private sphere under the multiply defined clarion call “the personal is political.” In the 1970s, new subjectivity would intensify artistic inward turning. The works under study also resonate with traditions of negativity in West German philosophical and literary thought. At the same time, these fictions are distinct because they reject notions of the liberatory potential of physicality, sexuality, and affect as popularized by Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse. Each of Smith-Prei’s chosen texts depicts variously deformed private spheres engendered by the warped subjectivities of the protagonists. With greater or lesser explicitness, each work links these deformations to malformed public spheres as well. In Wellershoff’s novel Ein schöner Tag (1966), physical symptoms such as paralysis and disturbing hallucinations exacerbate the dysfunctional relations between a father and son and their breadwinning daughter/sister. These symptoms and interpersonal practices are manifestations of repressed wartime trauma, particularly the death of their wife/mother. Here, the connections between corporeal negativity, fraught home lives, and the brutalities of social history are explicit. By contrast, Brinkmann’s short story In der Grube (1962) depicts how protagonists who grew up stifled in bourgeois [End Page 457] homes experience physical rigidity and ultimately disgust relative to sexuality and desire. Smith-Prei argues that although Brinkmann’s oeuvre is frequently considered politically disengaged, its aesthetics of detail and lack of programmatic affirmation offer readers shared authorship in the text and in their own lived realities, which the tales evoke...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.