@inbook{b392b272de444523b201408b06da96ad,
title = "Towards a Late Style?: Christa Wolf on Old Age, Death, and Creativity in Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud",
abstract = "This chapter examines Christa Wolf{\textquoteright}s engagement with lateness and death in her semi-autobiographical novel 'Stadt der Engel oder the Overcoat of Dr. Freud' (2010). Drawing both on Edward Said{\textquoteright}s influential writings on late style and on Walter Benjamin{\textquoteright}s essay {\textquoteleft}Der Erz{\"a}hler: Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Leskows{\textquoteright} [{\textquoteleft}The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov{\textquoteright}] (1936), the chapter demonstrates how the prospect of the narrator{\textquoteright}s death operates as both a thematic and structuring principle in Wolf{\textquoteright}s novel. It suggests that her engagement with the imminence of the narrator{\textquoteright}s death evokes a future anterior tense – a sense of {\textquoteleft}this will have been{\textquoteright} – which highlights the transitoriness of the present and raises questions about the post-mortem legacy of the writer and her work. In doing so, the chapter moves away from Said{\textquoteright}s understanding of an artist{\textquoteright}s late style as a gesture of leave-taking, an indication of the subject{\textquoteright}s impotence in the face of death. Instead, the chapter puts forward an alternative understanding of late style, inflected by Benjamin{\textquoteright}s conception of {\textquoteleft}Erz{\"a}hlen{\textquoteright} [narrating or storytelling] as an art form which situates the subjective experiences of an individual amongst those of past and future generations, transmitting these experiences beyond that individual{\textquoteright}s immediate death. The chapter argues that, for Wolf, the imminence of death lends greater legitimacy to her work, lifting it out of the sphere of the purely personal and into the realm of shared historical experience.",
keywords = "Late style , Lateness, Old age in literature, Death , Christa Wolf, Edward Said, Walter Benjamin, Life-writing, Autobiography, German Democratic Republic",
author = "Catherine Smale",
year = "2018",
doi = "10.1515/9783110496000",
language = "English",
isbn = "9783110496000",
series = "Companions to Contemporary German Culture",
publisher = "Walter de Gruyter GmbH",
pages = "181--200",
editor = "Klocke, {Sonja E.} and Hosek, {Jennifer R.}",
booktitle = "Christa Wolf",
address = "Germany",
}