What can contemporary German-speaking writers, with their obsessive preoccupation with the past, tell us about the cultural conflicts of today?

After looking at former literary periods and at specific literary essays, then focusing on a large number of contemporary literary case-studies, this work explores the spiritual resources and the aesthetical impulses by which literary approaches can enlarge our intercultural experiences and horizons. The studies examine how German-speaking narratives deal with migration, ethnicity and xenophobia, as well as how they sustain or disrupt national, religious and ethnical boundaries. In a time of ambivalent tendencies, when both globalization as well as ethnic-cultural conflicts are ever-increasing, this study tries to reveal the potential for tolerance contained in the German literary memory, to demonstrate how the representation of "the Other", of cultural and identity and alterity have become increasingly nuanced, and how this stimulates the dynamics of transcultural interconnection.

The study shows why contemporary fiction represents a definite step forward and a social critique in its exploration of ethical and political questions related to the impact of Eros on identity and its links to gender, power, violence, race and politics. Former taboos have been shattered by an aesthetics of the obscene, and the romantic utopia of love has been deconstructed by feminist gender theories. Literary narratives have foregrounded female sexuality and unstable borderline and homosexual identities, binding together sexual alterity and aesthetic innovation.

The article shows how postmodern literature offers new ways of re-thinking and re-reading Eros, how it responds to the changing mentalities and social morals and how it provides insight into the social-cultural paradigms, with which it enters a mutual relation of dialogue, contestation and parody. The ethics and aesthetics of Eros, that is, the literary representation of love, desire and sexuality, has dramatically changed during the last decades due to the influence of postmodern theories and the explosion of sexual discoursees in the public sphere. As a result, postmodern literature challenges the ethics of sexual identities and differences, interrogates stereotypes and conventions and heightens our critical awareness of them. It extends the modes of femininity and gender identities, and ultimately broadens our view of love, desire and sexuality.

Arbetet går in på följande frågeställningar:

Hur gestaltas och konstrueras kulturella gränser och identiteter i nutidslitteraturen? I vilken mån återspeglas sociokulturella förändringar och nya, interkulturella identitetsformer? Hur bidrar litterära berättelser som bärare av kulturellt minne till en konstruktion eller subversion av kollektiv identitet? Hur kan de främja interkulturell, gränsöverskridande emancipation? Hur präglas narrativa former av tidsenliga historie- och identitetsbilder?