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- Title
“An der Kernstelle der Existenz": Techno, Intoxication, and the Limits of Literary Representation in Rainald Goetz's Rave.
- Authors
Werbeck, Kai-Uwe
- Abstract
: This essay re-reads Rainald Goetz's novel Rave and argues that it is not – as some scholars have called it – a gratuitous exercise in authenticity effects. Rather, over the course of its three sections, Rave queries the limits of literary representations. Fascinated with the raw and unfiltered experiences allegedly endemic to the techno experience, Goetz proposes an experimental literature to communicate his decidedly non-literary, non-theoretical experiences in the clubs. This essay treats Rave as one of the authors's frantic attempts among many to faithfully render the intoxicated and fragmented experiences of city-life legible, mapping the unchartered territories of post-Wall Berlin when the nation was draped with stories of completeness and closure. In this light, Goetz contributes significantly to the creation of a new, urban literature that suggests alternative patterns and identities for life in reunified Germany. A distant relative to the canon of Metropolenliteratur, Rave lends literary gestalt to what Goetz understood as the post-national urban experience ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall: one that irritates linear narrativity, highlights a multitude of sensory perceptions, distorts time and space, suspends history through intoxication, and embraces the immediacy of the moment
- Subjects
GERMANY; GOETZ, Rainald, 1954-; EXPERIMENTAL literature; LITERARY theory; TECHNO culture
- Publication
Colloquia Germanica, 2017, Vol 50, Issue 2, p229
- ISSN
0010-1338
- Publication type
Article