Minor Literature

This paper purports to explore the narrative devices which enable the Anishinaabe Canadian author Richard Wagamese to compel the reader of his novel Indian Horse (2012) to experience the same violence as that faced by the young protagonist when the repressed memory of the terrible abuse suffered at an Indian residential school resurfaces decades after, disrupting the apparently linear course of the story. This study also seeks to show that Wagamese offers a major contribution to the rewriting of the history of residential schools in Canada by reclaiming Aboriginal narrative forms as a means to recover stolen memories, and thus to reconstruct both the fragmented (his)story and the shattered self.

One of Art Spiegelman’s motivations for using animal forms for the characters in the two volumes of Maus was to depict the dehumanization of the Jews during the Holocaust and as well the inhuman behavior of the Nazis and people of other nations. There is another side to this dehumanization in Maus that we will explore, namely what Deleuze and Guattari (D&G) call “becoming animal,” which is a mode of social and personal transformation undergone for the sake of survival and vitality and obtained through adaptation and mutation. D&G use Spinoza’s account of bodily composition and affective alteration to explain how threatening influences can push people and their groups into a temporary state of anonymity. While under this mode of indeterminacy, new arrangements and compositions may freely form and dissipate, which allows them to effectively survive, evade, and subvert the intruding powers. D&G further elaborate these notions of “becoming-animal” and the formation of anonymous “packs” by utilizing their concept of the “machinic assemblage,” whose parts reconfigure in order to disrupt or “minorize” the machinery of the larger system. This minorization operates as well on the level of language, where the minor group works within the major language system to undermine their oppressor’s regime of signs and values. Maus for example adopts the visually metaphoric language that presented the Jewish people in rodent form, as seen for instance in the Nazi propaganda documentary The Eternal Jew (Fritz Hippler, Der Ewige Jude, 1940), which depicts the Jews as rats infesting the entire world. But by shifting to mice and by drawing the Nazis as cats, Spiegelman evades the fixed meanings of the major visual language and introduces very different connotations and interpretations. Yet, one criticism of Spiegelman’s use of animal forms is that it sanitizes the horrors of the Holocaust and falsifies them by rendering them cute and harmless. I reply by including Maus under what D&G call a “minor genre,” in this case a particular kind of minor documentary. Filmed documentaries are rarely objective and unbiased, as we have seen already with the propaganda film The Eternal Jew’s distortions and misrepresentations. And Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985), instead of presenting any archival footage of the Holocaust, merely interviews survivors, witnesses and former Nazi SS officers to “document” the subjective realities internal to the events. Maus as well is based on the recorded interviews of a Holocaust survivor, but instead of providing objective depictions of the visual horrors in his experiences, it instead documents the existential experience of losing cultural and personal identity. And the horrors of this particular element of the events are more effectively and faithfully documented using animal forms.

This article investigates the work of Henry Miller in relation to Deleuze and Guatarri's concept of a minor literature. It examines several passages from Miller's work in detail, demonstrating how his writing subverts the major language of English under which it operates. Language is exposed, and exploited, as instable and dynamic through a writing style that rests on the periphery of conventional functionality. Miller's seemingly mundane prose at once becomes fragmented and fluidic, surprising the reader into no longer engaging with the text as a straightforward and transparent construct but as a reexamination of the inherent complexity, and ultimate impossibility, of such a project. Miller's style defies literary expectations of pre-existing genres. It undermines the presumptuous and banal definitions ascribed to the purpose of writing and instead permits it to remain an activity that is definable and perpetuated only by its very resistance to concretization, encouraging new and marginal, or perhaps "minor," forms of writing.

This article offers a literary appraisal of S.An-sky's wartime travelogue, Khurbn galitsye (published in English as "The Enemy at His Pleasure," 2002). Drawing on Walter Benjamin's theories of allegory, this analysis focuses on the prominent role accorded in the narrative to conspiracy theories, considering both how the conspiracy theory functions as a mode of allegorical reasoning and representation, and how the physical violence of World War I compels both An-sky and Benjamin to consider the necessity of new modes of representation as well as new modes of connection among culture, violence, and the human body in extremis. World War I, much like the Baroque era that feeds Benjamin's theorization, was a moment of transition in the conception of the world, and the conspiratorial thinking it spawned, much like the moment in which we live a century later, signifies the proliferating ("viral") anxieties that living between temporalities, languages, and social orders creates.

Walter Benjamin states number of possibilities with regard to memory, change, and philosophy in his paper, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire. He begins with the reception of lyrical poetry and later he moves towards the discussion on the general resistance which is being shown in accepting lyrical poetry. He mentions how people turn to philosophy when it comes to understand the change in life. Philosophy is an attempt to grasp the true nature of experience because often true experience and the standardized experience are indistinguishable. He claims the experience to be a matter of tradition in collective existence. He also considers it tobe a matter of private life. He suggests how the unconscious frequent memory actively involves itself in creating experience. And it is intriguing how we create complementary memory in opposed to the true memory in order to buffer the real experience. He brings Marcel Proust to farther discuss the creation and instigation of memory or the voluntary and involuntary memory.

This project uses the "not of this world" motif to examine Christian literature as by definition a minority literature, even when Christianity is the majority religion. I look at the multicultural aspects of the biblical Book of Daniel and the Gospel of John, as well as the polycultural aspects of Christian history and missions, noting the early diversity of the church as it made quick inroads into Africa and Asia before becoming Europeanized, and noting the cultural challenges faced by the church in the modern era as it encountered the Americas and returned to Africa and Asia. I also look at three theologians who discuss the separation of the church from the political world: Augustine, Luther, and Kierkegaard. Finally, I examine six devotional authors in terms of concepts borrowed from contemporary ethnic studies: Saint Patrick and exile; Richard Rolle and minor literature; Saint Catherine and borderlands; George Fox and nationalism v. tribalism; Thomas Merton and contact zones; and Kathleen Norris and diaspora.

This paper considers some of the cultural, critical and commercial frameworks that operate in the dissemination of Turkish literature in global, particularly UK, markets. Examining which Turkish writers are translated, their publishers and the critical reception their works receive, allows us to investigate the cultural and political ideologies and hierarchies that shape their profiles in the UK. Recently published novels by Moris Farhi, Perihan Ma_den, Orhan Pamuk, and Elif Shafak promote a number of related concerns.  The complex and contradictory significations involving Turkish identity invited by these writers, and their critical reception in the UK, raise questions around not only the burden of political signification forced upon Turkish writers who are forced into the role of what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari define as a ‘minor literature,’ but also around the key role of the cultural intermediary in promoting Turkish culture abroad.  Domestically Turkish literature, like Turkish culture in general, is undergoing a period of intense and exciting creativity as the nation attempts to articulate its crucial political and cultural role in the international arena as a conduit between global capitalism, European liberal humanitarian values and Islamic principles. This paper explores the extent to which Turkish literature can thrive in an international arena and how much this depends on how successfully writers and their cultural intermediaries can negotiate global markets and domestic political persecution.

Is the concept of queer translation yet another recent, unexciting addition to the theoretical toolbox of queer theory and translation studies? Or does it actually make a difference and offer an opportunity for both queer theory and translation studies to reevaluate their critical practices? Employing Gilles Deleuze’s form of immanent critique, this article reconstructs a new concept of queer translation, redefined here as the minor art of desexualizing language in a repetition of difference. Understood as essentially pragmatic, problematic, and genetic, the Deleuzian critique of queer translation begins by scrutinizing two current conceptions of queer translation and their attempts at establishing the difference they make. I trace their critical impasses back to the type of thinking (or “image of thought”) that had engendered them: one that is based on a “weak” concept of difference in queer theory, and the other—on a “weak” concept of repetition in translation studies. In order to create a new concept of queer translation, I then turn to Deleuze’s concept of writing as pivot on which the theoretical concept becomes pertinent from a practical standpoint. This move not only renders the concept more coherent and effective, but also enable us, I argue, to discern existing practices of queer translation at play even in original works of literature. In the final section of the article, this argument is thus demonstrated in a discussion of French author Marie Darrieussecq’s literary technique in the novel Truismes (Pig Tales).

J. L. Austin's claim that language ‘used not seriously’ is ‘parasitic’ upon ‘normal use’ has proved a puzzle to literary scholars, who have often taken this to mean that they are not allowed to apply the insights of speech-act theory to their own object of research. This article explores how, when read together, Michel Serres’ definition of the parasite as a ‘thermal exciter’ and Deleuze's concept of ‘minor literature’ bring out the hidden potential inherent in Austin's claim. More specifically, the article argues that Austin's reference to literature as a parasitic entity might become a promising conceptual gift, allowing us to generate a new model for approaching the world-shaping potential of literary texts.

What is Upendra Baxi's contribution to jurisprudence in India? Baxi's single-most important contribution to jurisprudence in India has been to infuse legal scholarship with pathos – the pathos of suffering, resistance, responsibility and care. An apocryphal reading of Baxi's work might make us consider his passionate heft as a sentimental inflection, but it will not necessarily lead us to consider this as a jurisprudence. Baxi's pathos endeavors to unmask law's violence and silence about the suffering of those on the margins (even as he has offered ways of working with law); and in turn Baxi's pathos has become marginal to the teaching and learning of jurisprudence in India. Indian legal education is marked by a simultaneous presence and absence of Baxi. His work is acclaimed for its rigorous content, but not necessarily for its innovative forms. While his politics is contingently celebrated, his aesthetics is considered removed from jurisprudential insight. It might be well accepted that Baxi writes with pathos, but does that pathos constitute a jurisprudence? In this essay, I offer some illustrations of Baxi's minor jurisprudence by looking at three particular forms of writings which don't get counted as part of his jurisprudential oeuvre: his lesser known works in the field of law, acknowledgements and footnotes that appear on the margins of major works, and tributes written by him on the passing of his mentors and comrades. My choice of the selected references has to do particularly with how these writings have helped me think through my own work as a law teacher and scholar.

This paper describes (for the first time in German and to some extent in Georgian as well) wat is contemporary Georgian literatura, what are the main differences from the soviet Georgian Literatura, what ar the main topics, main stilistic differences, ästhetic and political positions.

במאמר זה אני מבקשת לבחון את ספרה של חווה עציוני-הלוי, כחוט השני, כספרות מינורית, תוך בחינת מעשיהן של בנות צלפחד כאקט פמיניסטי, עוד לפני שנושא הפמיניזם עלה לדיון. כדי לבחון את ספרה של עציוני-הלוי כספרות מינורית אגדיר בקצרה את נושא הפמיניזם כדי להבהיר את מהותה של הספרות המינורית כפי שמשתקף בספר, אגדיר מהי ספרות מינורית ואנתח את הרומן תחת משקפי מודל זה.

My study approaches the use of Guatemalan Spanish in modern Maya literary works through a theoretical framework drawn on theories of "purity" and mestizaje, the concept of minor literature, and "image" and ideology of language. I problematize the "major"/"minor" dichotomy of language based on a Eurocentric view of the dominance of national languages as the extremely diverse linguistic ecology of Latin American lends itself to the deterritorialization of hegemonic discourse, but without sustaining a neat categorization of language. Guatemalan Spanish is a heavily Maya-inflected interlanguage share by all Guatemalans. Mayan writers chose purposefully to counter the ladino ethnocentrism of the time, including its ideologies of racial and linguistic "purity." In spite of the racial caste system that stealthily thrives to this day, these literary works force readers to confront that not only ladino (mestizo) culture has infiltrated Maya society, but that all Guatemalans have been culturally and linguistically mayanized.

This essay puts political theory and ethnography into an engagement with orature in order to advance a new model of agency, authority, and collectivity, in which politics reveals itself to be an "ecological" process involving the conjoint action of the living, the ancestors, and the land. I explore the orature of the Gurensi people of Ghana in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of “minor literature,” which refers to a way of appropriating language as a “collective utterance” to call forth new political identities and sensitivities. By sensitizing us to the expressivity of the land as reciprocating ancestors, I argue that Gurensi orature might affect a “stutter” in the majoritarian orientations of Euro-American ecophilosophy, which has hitherto neglected African traditions of thought. It might give voice to the “subjugated” knowledges and earthen languages of an African people that trouble the dual colonization of the aural-oral by the literary and of nonhumans by humans.

This essay glosses the political conceptualism of Amelia Rosselli through the lens of her ‘new geometrism’, inflected by the open-field poetics of Charles Olson on the one hand, and by the dialectic between non-intentionality and constraint, freedom and imprisonment explored by practitioners of the New Music on the other. The phrase ‘Disintegratedcantons’ in an early riposte to the neoavanguardia links Rosselli’s formal research with a political aspiration (or trauma) : the dream (or nightmare) of a ‘total’ language, poised to host all possible rhythms, yet ultimately giving rise to the discomposing syntheses of transnational clashes. Atomic metaphors in Pasolini’s readings of Rosselli's first published Italian poems elicit the force of these clashes : Rosselli generates a post-Enlightenment poetics, exposing the violent unreason stemming from the programmatic disenchantment of history.

On the face of it, Prague’s English-speaking literature appears to constitute a perfect, almost paradigmatic example of a “minor literature” as understood by Deleuze and Guattari. Written in the culturally dominant language of the age, it is nevertheless shot through with ambivalence towards the linguistic otherness of the Czech environment in which it is set. Because this literary tradition is not the product of a settled community defined by imperative political or cultural circumstances but that of “nomadic” young expatriates seeking adventure and new experiences in an exotic setting of their choosing, its scope for distanciation is accentuated moreover by a self-produced sense of rootlessness and historical discontinuity. At the same time, though, the inscription of Prague’s English-speaking literature in a wider context of accelerating globalisation and the perceived “Americanisation” of Central European societies after the fall of the Berlin Wall undermines its status as an original and autonomous local “scene” both meaningfully embedded in its geo-cultural context and clearly distinct either from the global Anglo-American canon or commercial mainstream. Instead of a “minor literature” playing creatively with its distance to an isolated yet locally dominant culture, it often appears to be the expression of a rather dystopian cosmopolitanism (or “cosmotopianism”, cf. Muller & Wallace 2013) whose capacity for playful or creative distanciation is lost to a pervading, if ironic sense of alienation, schizophrenia and diffuse pointlessness. As such, the Anglo-American Prague expats often reveals themselves to be not fully competent or self-assertive cultural actors capable of forging and defending an idiosyncratic “minor” identity in a specific and inspiring milieu, but mere echoes or – in reference to probably the best “Prague English Novel”, by Tom McCarthy – men lost in a nondescript space. All the question, it would seem, is to decide whether this unaccomplished, derivative and almost deferential dimension of Prague’s English-speaking literature should be seen as a symptom of failure and irrelevance, or as a significant marker of its identity as a bona fide and genuinely interesting literary phenomenon of the 90s.

Cet article examine le premier roman de l’écrivain translingue Sayed Kashua qui, à la différence de la majeure partie des écrivains palestiniens en Israël, publie exclusivement en hébreu. Nous soulignerons à travers L’analyse de "Les Arabes dansent aussi" une écriture palestinienne en hébreu, jusque-là peu connue, qui narre des identités multiples et complexes en hébreu tout en empruntant la problématique de la filiation et l’identité minoritaire au roman arabe-palestinien. S’il est impossible pour S. Kashua d’écrire en arabe littéraire, il lui est cependant impossible de ne pas écrire en hébreu et de ne pas narrer les identités. En tant qu’auteur mineur, S. Kashua a tenté avec sa première tentative littéraire de façonner un personnage palestinien centré dans une logique de mimétisme : il ne dessine rien, il ne crée rien. Il reproduit l’homme juif-Israélien, comme sa ressemblance.

Eng-
This article examines the first novel by the translingual writer Sayed Kashua who, unlike most Palestinian writers in Israel, publishes exclusively in Hebrew. We will highlight through the exploration of Dancing Arabs, an unknown Palestinian writing in Hebrew, a novel which narrates multiple and complex identities in Hebrew while borrowing the subject of belonging and minority identity from the Arab-Palestinian novel. If it is impossible for S. Kashua to write in literary Arabic, it is, however, impossible for him not to write in Hebrew and not to narrate identities. As a minor author, S. Kashua tried with his first literary attempt, to shape a Palestinian character centred in a logic of mimicry: he draws nothing, he creates nothing. He reproduces the Jewish-Israeli man as his resemblance.

This paper, which suggests a twofold approach, will first examine the fish-fisherman-sea relationship with reference to Kant’s two different types of sublime, namely the ‘Mathematical Sublime’ and the ‘Dynamic Sublime’, in two works with similar subjects, written by two eminent twentieth century authors: Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Bilge Karasu’s The Prey. This paper also aims to serve as an account of Kant’s sublime using comparative literary examples as a way to make what Kant has to say more explicit. In the second part, the paper will argue that, through analysis of the two works, their constructions of identity, and the workings of the Sublime in major and minor literature, The Prey rightly belongs to minor literature. However, it should be indicated that a detailed comparison of the two pieces in terms of their literary characteristics is the subject matter of another essay and beyond the scope of the interests of the discussion here. In other words, in the second part of this essay, it is only attempted to make a brief comparative analysis of the sublime as it relates to the creation of identity in minor literature. It is also worth emphasizing that this is just an alternative way of exploring the sublime.

This article looks for the characteristic elements of minor literature in a novella by Hilda Hilst entitled The Unicorn (1969). In this line of research, I use concepts created by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their study of Franz Kafka's literature. A few of these concepts are machinic assemblage of desire and collective assemblage of enunciation, order-words, and majority/minority. In her writing, Hilda Hilda creates relationships with innumerable flows and assemblages. For this reason, an affectionate reading, in Deleuze's words, should follow the same lines: "This manner of reading, in intensities, in rapport with the outside, flow against flow [...] is an affectionate way. (DELEUZE, 1997, p. 18). What is important here are the ramifications: how does the text function with reference to the hegemonic heterosexual assemblage in Brazil, circa 1969? With reference to the capitalist assemblage? Does Hilst destabilize the capitalist assemblage?

Este trabajo examina la noción de autorrepresentación a través de las prácticas visuales de la subalternidad y de la idea de sujeto colectivo bajo el concepto de "imagen menor", que procede de los estudios de Deleuze sobre la literatura de Kafka. Para ello, es preciso repensar los conceptos de representación y enunciación en el contexto de la imagen digital, todo lo cual implica una crítica radical al modelo de interpretación puramente representacional. Se hace necesario pensar la dimensión performativa y la dimensión retórica de las imágenes, sus articulaciones a través de discursos y sus capacidades para romperlos, pero también para constatarlos o consolidarlos. La potencia política de las imágenes no puede así estudiarse solamente desde la perspectiva de la crítica de la representación, sino entendiendo que toda representación está ligada a un carácter epistémico. Por ello el trabajo elabora el concepto de "imagen menor" que, unido a las dimensiones contemporáneas de la injusticia epistémica, pretende dar cuenta de la importancia política de la autorrepresentación.

“Minor literature” is an elusive concept in literary scholarship. Its widespread use stands in sharp contrast to the paucity of its theoretical development, which is limited to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s 1975 seminal book Kafka _Pour une littérature mineure_. We claim that a comparative history of minor literatures in European languages – a nonexistent project so far – requires three preliminary steps, namely, conceptual clarification, cross-pollination between comparative literary history and the digital humanities, and a bibliometric analysis of the minor-literature constellation. First, conceptual clarification is needed to show, on the one hand, how Deleuze and Guattari’s arguments on minor literatures
significantly differ from those of what they posit as their source (Kafka’s
discussion on kleine Literaturen) and, on the other hand, the existence of alternative genealogies. Second, by adhering to a Braudelian definition of comparative history, the massive data needed for addressing the production and reception of (minor) literatures in specific social and cultural contexts would immensely benefit from recourse to digital tools. Third, and as an example of approaching conceptual clarification with digital tools, a quantitative study of the minorliterature constellation must be performed using a key tool of international scholarship (the MLA International Bibliography). In the current paper, we may only provide an introductory survey of these three fields and, therefore, the results are
tentative and further research is needed.

" Literature argues not by articulating premises and conclusions but by prompting its audience to develop them for itself. " 0. It is tempting to address at length in an abstract fashion the forceful and condensed premise that we are supposed to examine, discuss and argue about as a tool to re-theorize not only critical interpretation but the process, structure and ethics of literary communication; it is all too tempting because it would allow us to display and exploit a vast array of concepts borrowed from the history of poetics, rhetoric and reception. But most of the questions that have intrigued me in the past fifteen or twenty years about globalization, World Literature, postcolonial fiction, translatedness, etc. and that the liminal statement or proposition quoted might help me solve or at least reformulate or reset, invite me on the contrary to remain sober in this respect and limit myself to exposing briefly my understanding or misunderstanding of the basic assumptions behind this statement. 1) " Literature argues " Literature, whether it argues or not and however it does it, is presented as an entity that resembles a human subject insofar as it is the subject of acts of speech. It is not only a regime of discourse, or a code. The letter of literature, its text is not treated as an arbitrary collection of signs or a dead archive but as the living locus of an intentionality, it is not self-contained, autotelic, it seeks to produce effects. 2) " literature prompt[s] its audience " " Literature " is not seen as the totality of the situations, agents and processes involved in the production, transmission and exchange of aestheticized/aestheticizable acts of speech, but more probably as a corpus of texts in which a will-to-do is deposited and that is activated by reading. Therefore, as an event, it takes place within a space-time oriented by classical communicational directionality, a message being conveyed from a sender to a receiver. 3) " its audience to develop them for itself " The end user (receiver/interpreter) of " literature " is collective and autonomous. The extent to which its members or component parts (individual readers) collaborate to unify the reception field or develop conflicting interpretations is not specified any more than the nature of the bond between literature and audience: is it a merely pragmatic bond, or reciprocal belonging, or an ongoing negotiation between forces? This crucial question is left open and it is mainly through this indeterminacy that we can try to apply the proposed maxim to the reception-programming strategies of postcolonial fiction and assess its productivity without questioning at this stage the assumptions revealed in 1) and 2).

Sevim Burak'ın 1965 yılında yayımlanan Yanık Saraylar adlı kitabının içindeki dördüncü öykü olan "Büyük Kuş" , en genel anlamıyla erkek egemen düzende "öteki oluş" un, "kadın oluş" un öyküsüdür. Öyküde, eril-kentin sokaklarında dolaşan kadının kendine ait olmayan dışsal alandaki mücadelesi, yersiz-yurtsuzluğu ve hayatta kalma çabası amorf bir dil aracılığıyla aktarılmıştır. Dil bilgisi kurallarının, noktalama işaretlerinin alt üst edildiği metinde, cümlelerin çizgisel sürekliliği anlayışına da darbe vurularak parçalı bir anlatım tekniği tercih edilmiştir. Bu bağlamda "Büyük Kuş" öyküsü, eril iktidarın söylemini ve onun kurallarını kullanmayı reddeden, bu iktidar tarafından sindirilmiş, yok sayılmış kadınların sesini hâkim dilde çeşitli oyuklar açarak duyurmaya çalışan bir eser olup, bu özellikleriyle de minör edebiyatla paslaşan bir yapıdadır. Eserdeki içerik ve biçim müzakeresi ise feminist eleştirinin ana düşünsel pratikleri ile minör yazının biçimsel özelliklerini bir araya getiren bir köprünün kurulmasını sağlayan ana etkenlerdendir.

Minör Edebiyat ve Zweig" (Bu yazı, Bennet Miller'ın The Team Foxcatcher filmi temaşa edilirken akla geldi, tasarlandı. Yazıldı. Karmaşık olmayan bir sözdizim ve kavram tercihi nedeniyle felsefecileri rahatsız edebilir. Ancak yapacak bir şey yoktu, Deleuze'ün Fransızcayla oluşturduğu dil bizi dışarıda tutuyor. Ayrıca, biz sadece Zweig'in Dünyası'nın 'minör edebiyat' olup olmadığını bilmek istiyoruz. "Biz" diye başladık konuşmaya, çünkü iki kişi yazıyoruz bu metni. Aşağıda herhangi bağlamda bu paragrafı göremeyeceğiniz için parantez içine aldık. )

In an editor's note to Gilles Dcleuze's and Felix Guattari s What is a Minor Literature?", Robert Brinkley writes about the problem of how to enter Kafka's world. Since there appear to be too many entrances, yet none of these seem privileged, it is up to the reader to "choose an opening and map the passage he finds himself following. The map will change if a different entrance is chosen" (13). Aichinger's oeuvre, often compared to Kafka's, poses a similar challenge for the reader, offering multiple entries to her deterritorialised, rhizomatic writing. In the following, I choose the animal as an entry into both Aichinger's and Michie s oeuvres. Their ani mals are central to a collective and political critique that makes both Aichinger's and Michie's oeuvres part of what Deleuze and Guattari call a "minor literature", that is, a literature that deterritorialises language, con nects the individual to a political immediacy, and offers a collective as semblage of enunciation (Kafka, 16f.). A minor literature resists territorialisation, the dominant discourse, codification and the desire to de code" and thus offers both artists "a line of flight (liberation as opposed to submission-[...] an exit, outlet)" (Kafka, 13). Both Michie s and Aichinger's experiences of discrimination, persecution and expulsion led them to choose artistic paths that challenge the dominant discourse and to affirm perspectives that are not those of the culture they inhabit, but instead make visible identities that challenge the norm and deterritorialise power structures along the way. Aichinger, who writes in the dominant language of her culture, in verts language in her "Rhetorik des Schweigens' (Schmitz-Emans, 57) in an attempt to reclaim German from the semantic abuse it experienced under the Nazi regime. Julia Sonja Brassat describes Aichinger s deterrito

Anlatılamayacak kadar feci olaylar yaşandığında, edebiyat çaresiz bir sessizliğe teslim olur, en azından ilk anda. Edebiyat sanki yaşanan feci olaylar karşısında 'kifayetsiz' ya da 'yetersiz' kalıyormuş gibi bir sessizlik hakim olur. Bu son zamanlarda çok dile getirilen bir şey; feci bir toplumsal olay karşısında kalemin susması, bir şeyler yazmanın imkansızlığı. Türkiye'nin tarihi bir toplumsal krizler ve felaketler tarihi olduğu ve son yıllarda kriz ve felaketler yoğunlaştığı için bu meseleyi tekrar ele almak gerekiyor; mevcut toplumsal kriz ve felaketler içerisinde edebiyat, yazı nerede durur? Bir felaket / kriz döneminde yazmaya devam etmek mümkün müdür? 'Anlatılamaz derecede' feci olan şeyleri edebiyat nasıl anlatır? Anlatırsa, hangi yolları izler? Bu yazıya felaket ve edebiyat üzerine yazan Maurice Blanchot, Marc Nichanian ve Giorgio Agamben gibi düşünürlerin fikirleri eşlik edecek. Latife Tekin, Bilge Karasu, Birgül Oğuz, Defne Sandalcı, Şener Özmen, Hüseyin Kıran ve Murat Özyaşar gibi siyasi / toplumsal (ve bazen de şahsi) krizleri ve şiddeti ele alan yazarların metinleri de edebiyatın felaket ve krizle 'baş etmek' için kullandığı farklı yolları

This study aims at probing into the heated debate about whether minor literature deals
exclusively with communal concerns or it manifests an individual value. Minor writers
discuss various themes related to their transnational identities, belonging issues, displacement,
and alienation. However, in recent years, scholars claim that these writers are becoming more
comfortable in their host countries. Thus, this comfort appears in the themes they tackle
which are more likely to reflect postmigrant realities of individuals’ everyday experiences. In
Britain, minority writers have gained an increasing attention for their literary production
which showcases skill and creativity. The Arab Muslim British writer Leila Aboulela
occupies an important position in the British literary canon. Through her latest novel Bird
Summons (2019), this study will investigate whether minor literature is solely a representation
of political, collective experiences or it is an individual expression of minority writers. The
thesis will deal with collective concerns that Aboulela’s characters express such as,
frustrations of displacement, the empowering aspects of Islam, and food as an ethnic
solidarity. This study will also explore the individual aspects in the novel embodied in the
ambivalence of motherhood and the anxiety of age. The thesis shows that Aboulela is a
minority writer whose work reveals the possibility of combining the collective and the
individual concerns in minority literature.

In Peter Weiss debut Från ö till ö (1947) the ‘I’ travels from island to island as a castaway. The island here can signify, or work as a synecdoche for exile and the feeling of isolation that exile often induces. But the move- ment from island to island also implies a restless state: Peter Weiss shifting from painting to writing to film- making and theatre, from German to Swedish and then back to German. The years during exile and the years that followed the exile until his breakthrough in Germany with Schatten des körpers des Kütchens (1960), Ab- schied von den Eltern (1961) and Fluchtpunkt (1962), were the formative years of Peter Weiss authorship. In Swe- den he abandoned a Hesse-influenced new-romanticism – an aesthetic and political dead-end in the 1940s – and oriented towards the Swedish modernists – fyrtiotalisterna – discovered psychoanalysis and became po- litically “aware”. These happenings – or machines as this essay likes to view them – all influenced and pro- duced Weiss Swedish prose which is this essay’s main focus. Following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari this essay understands Weiss Swedish authorship as a minor authorship. As Franz Kafka was in the German lan- guage, Peter Weiss was a stranger in Swedish and in Sweden, a “foreign bird” as one critic calls him. As a minor writer he is a political writer, the political realities are connected to him, his half-Jewish body is inter- twined in the (bio)political realities of mid-century Germany; and those realities are visible in his prose, even if he himself, or his contemporaries, see him as an unpolitical author. Therefore there is no unpolitical and political period in the œuvre of Peter Weiss. Instead there are different flows and movements, from the politi- cal, from the production of the psychoanalytic-, modernist- and romantic-machine among others. There are lines of flights, deterritorialization and reterritorialization. This essay aims to follow some of these lines in the Swedish prose of Peter Weiss.

Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic method is pragmatic, problematising and political because it aims to locate paths of release from entrenched and powerful structures of being and fixed ways of life, which constrain possibilities for diversifying existence and limit the creative potential for innovation. Literature is a natural ally of schizoanalysis, in so far as both are involved in the diagnosis of social malaise and the creative labour of the invention of alternative worlds. Literature often imagines characters involved in finding lines of flight from the problematic situations that confine them, and so can open up for the reader new ways of understanding worldly situations as assemblages of desire and power, and new ways of experiencing their own being in time as a moment of actual capture and a set of virtual escape strategies. A schizoanalytic literary criticism would be directed towards the ways in which a literary work depicts and forges associations – between characters, between situations, between actual and virtual worlds or modes of life, and between the work and the reader – that bring to light new possibilities for life and for the invention of a people to come.
This chapter presents a schizoanalysis of The Rape of Sita, written by the postcolonial feminist author Lindsey Collen.  Banned in Mauritius upon its publication in 1993, her book tells of a traumatic process of subjective capture and collapse - accompanied by a wilful process of transformation and self-renewal - experienced by the protagonist Sita when she recovers a suppressed memory of a rape endured a decade earlier while visiting the French colony of Reunion. Although Sita is the heroine of this story, the work primarily develops as a tale of the affective communities traversed by Sita and the narrator Iqbal, who is drawn into a process of becoming-woman capable of disrupting the problematic forms of gendered subjectivity that make rape possible. Iqbal engages directly with the reader in his role as the narrator of Sita’s story, thereby involving us in his metamorphosis. Collen is a ‘political author, prophet of the future world’ and The Rape of Sita is a work of minor literature that translates and disassembles dominant mechanisms of desire and power. It thereby creates new possibilities for transformation in the world of the reader, where desire is captured by entrenched forms of power that perpetuate capitalist, colonial and sexual violence - just as it is in the fictional world inhabited by Sita and Iqbal.

Drawing on recent discussions in world literature, I explore Danilo Kiš and Dubravka Ugrešić within the formation of transactional exchanges between "small/minor" and world literatures. As I approach these exchanges, my focus is on texts and contexts in which translation and memory function as the key mediator. By reading Kiš and Ugrešić comparatively, my aim, in what I call "the minor drive," is to address writers and translators that contest hegemonic narratives, and in doing so, examine the cultural enterprise of "small/minor" literatures from the perspective of "worlding" former Yugoslavia and Southeast Europe.

Este artículo propone una articulación entre el campo de estudio dela literatura menor con el del spinozismo literario para establecer los principios conceptuales de la teoría transindividual de la literatura. Para esto, nos adentramos en la formulación de la idea minoría en literatura según  Deleuze y Guattari, estableciendo vínculos con la relación de Spinoza y la literatura, en el sentido en que Macheray, Tatián, Jaquet y otros han trabajado. Un bosquejo conceptual es elaborado con el marco epistemológico de lo transindividual que ofrecen los trabajos de Balibar y Morfino.

Il y a peu est par u chez Far r ar, Str aus and Gir oux le der nier -et vingtième -livr e de J ohn Ashber y: Your Name Here. Et cette fois encor e, le poète Amér icain le plus acclamé de ces der nièr es décennies confir me sa r éputation d'écr ivain incompr éhensible. Une telle affir mation pour r ait aussi bien pr ovenir d'un détr acteur. Il me semble par ailleur s que les détr acteur s d'Ashber y augmentent pr opor tionnellement au volume de son oeuvr e et à son pr estige mondial. L'auteur du pr ésent ar ticle cr oit fer mement, au contr air e, en la br avour e, l'intelligence et le sér ieux du der nier Ashber y. L'incompr éhensibilité est une donnée objective de son écr itur e -«incompr éhensible» car, selon l'étymologie, impossible à contenir. Elle n'a pas même pas de «contenu », puisque tout voudr ait et pour r ait y entr er, mais tout ne s'y tr ouve pour tant pas. De toute façon, l'acte de compr endr e ne semble pas êtr e pour Ashber y la plus heur euse des aventur es spir ituelles. Un poème d'Ashber y est un espace limité dans lequel ne pénètr e que ce qui se faufile suffisamment vite par la por te d'entr ée: une phr ase, un souvenir, une citation, une association d'idées, un jeu de mots. P hr ases, souvenir s, citations, etc. étant équivalents les uns aux autr es. Ici la littér atur e ou, mieux, la littér ar ité n'ont aucune pr ior ité. Il est r ar e de tr ouver dans cette poésie un ter me savant ou une r éminiscence ér udite. Le langage ashber yen est celui de la télé, de la publicité, des mondanités new-yor kaises, des conver sations téléphoniques, dont il est fr iand, du cinéma de sér ie B, pour lequel il affiche une passion pour le moins ir r itante, et des jour naux, 1 « Je dois arranger/ les choses du bébé. Je me dirige vers le grenier. Ne viens pas./ Je t'assure, tout est sous contrôle.

The overlap and potential confusion of the quantitative or dimensional and the qualitative or hierarchical uses of " minor " and " minority " (as smaller or lesser) in the cultural and literary sphere always bind them to a quest for power, from mere survival to almightiness. The initial uses of " minor " in Western literary histories (as in " minor works " and " minor classics ") are related to canon formation and periodization, they operate on the border between inclusion and exclusion but within a clearly defined, supposedly undisputed territory. Deleuze's political subversion of the term " minor " in his study of Kafka is still confined to the agonistics of European universalisms, the deterritorialization involved remains both magic and tragic. His " virtually postcolonial " approach must be reconsidered in view of radically different worlding strategies adopted —deliberately or not— by so-called postcolonial literatures, whether they are written in a dominant colonial language or in a " native " language. The two case studies presented and compared attempt to show that the Empire(s) not only write back, but can write out from within the specific reconstructed non-national anthropological space of the located work of art and thus ground alternative universalisms in the material culture of local soil. Critical particularism and individual consciousness progressively become the tools of a new cosmopolitanism freed from European abstraction and atemporal metaphoricity.