Revolting Families places the literary depiction of familial and intimate relations in 1960s West Germany against the backdrop of public discourse on the political significance of the private sphere. Carrie Smith-Prei focuses on debut works by German authors considered to be part of the “new” and “black” realism movements: Dieter Wellershoff, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Gisela Elsner, and Renate Rasp. Each of the works by these authors uses depictions of neurosis, disgust, vertigo, or violence to elicit a reaction in readers that calls them to political, social, or ethical action.

Revolting Families thus extends the concept of negativity, which has long been part of post-war German philosophical and aesthetic theory, to the body in German literature and culture. Through an analysis of these texts and of contextual discourse, Smith-Prei develops a theoretical concept of corporeal negativity that works to provoke socio-political engagement with the private sphere.

Carrie Smith is the vice dean of the Faculty of Arts and a professor of German Studies at the University of Alberta.

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‘Smith-Prei has produced a very valuable contribution to the scholarship of the body and its representation in 1960s prose and has extended important critical attention to texts that, to differing degrees, have been marginalized.’

Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies vol 51:03:2015