Description
Book SynopsisIn the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Berlin has re-emerged as a global city in large part thanks to its reputation as a literary city – a place where artists from around the world gather and can make a life. Moving Words foregrounds the many contexts in which life in the city of Berlin is made literary – from old neighbourhood bookshops to new reading circles, NGOs working to secure asylum for writers living in exile to specialized workshops for young migrant poets. Highlighting the differences, tensions, and contradictions of these scenes, this book reveals how literature can be both a site of domination and a resource for resisting and transforming those conditions. By attending to the everyday lives of writers, readers, booksellers, and translators, it offers a crucial new vantage point on the politics of difference in contemporary Europe, at a moment marked by historical violence, resurgent nationalism, and the fraught politics of migrati
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: Berlin, City of Letters 2. The Prosody of Social Ties: Poetry and Fleeting Moments in a Workshop 3. Exile in Translation: The Politics of Remaining Unknown 4. In the Footsteps of a Flaneur: A Grammar of Returning (to a Street) 5. Collecting, Selecting, Connecting: Making Books and Making Do 6. Life in a Net of Language: Literature, Translation, and the Feel of Words Notes References Index
