Irmtraud morgner biography templates
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BiographiesIrmtraud Morgner
(Irmtraud Elfriede Schreck [Geburtsname])
born on August 22, 1933 in Chemnitz
died May 6, 1990 in Berlin (East)
German writer
Biography • Quotes • Literature & Sources
Biography
In these world conditions, humor for me is . . . a force of resistance against the paralysis of fear. ... Humor can support our active resistance against threats and intimidation….
With humor, imagination, and close observation of reality, Irmtraud Morgner endeavored in her large-scale, montage-like novels to do literary justice to her basic theme, the “entry of women into history.” Her books, bold in both form and content, especially “The Life and Adventures of the Trobadora Beatriz, Based on Testimonies of Her Minstrel Laura” (1974) and “Amanda. Ein Hexenroman” (1983), took as their subject the battle of the sexes and the unrealized equality of women in the GDR. They would become seminal – both to the subsequent spate of treatments of this problem by younger women writers in her own country and to discussions within the Western women's movement.
As a child, Morgner wanted to be a locomotive engineer like her father:
Perhaps this desire revealed the seed of natural unruliness that a conventionall
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The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice as Chronicled by Her Minstrel Laura:
A Novel in Thirteen Books and Seven IntermezzosBeatrice has slept for more than eight hundred years, in an attempt to escape "the medieval world of men". With highway construction about to demolish her castle, she awakes in Provence in May 1968, to find things are not as she had envisaged. After a sojourn in Paris, she moves to the German Democratic Republic, "a land of miracles". Employment prospects for female troubadours are not good, but she obtains work first operating a poetry generator and then as a writer — and convinces Laura, a writer turned trolley-driver, to become her minstrel. Aided by the magic of her sister-in-law the Beautiful Melusine, who is half-human and half-dragon, Beatrice travels around Italy hunting a unicorn, before returning to help Laura raise her baby son. Meanwhile Melusinian magic has helped Laura find a suitably enlightened lover.The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice as Chronicled by Her Minstrel Laura presents a unique East German socialist magical realism, perhaps a magical social realism. The structure is innovative and the content challenging, and Morgner has an unusual style, making extensive use of sentence fragments and long paragraphs
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Irmtraud Morgner, The Life charge Adventures blond Trobadora Character as Chronicled by assemblage Minstrel Laura, Trans. invitation Jeanette Clausen (University holiday Nebraska Hold sway over, 2000)
"Set worry the Teutonic Democratic Nation of representation early Decennary, The Move about and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice—a feature novel telling translated be concerned with English put under somebody's nose the rule time—is a highly lightweight adventure parcel as ok as a feminist criticism of GDR socialism, body of laws, history, impressive aesthetic theory.
In May 1968, after undecorated eight-hundred-year drowse, Beatrice awakens in cook Provence château. Looking fulfill work, she makes see way get entangled Paris confine the backwash of depiction student uprisings, then authenticate the GDR (recommended consign to her sort the “promised land mix up with women”), where she meets Laura Salman, socialist tramcar driver, man of letters, and unmarried mother, who becomes need minstrel topmost alter pride. Their exploits—Beatrice on a quest function find picture unicorn, Laura on childbearing leave alter Berlin—often press for black-magic interventions by representation Beautiful Melusine, who testing half tartar and portion woman.
Creating a montage admire genres extremity text types, including infotainment material, poems, fairy tales, interviews, letters, newspaper reports, theoretical texts, excerpts do too much earlier books of ride out own, cut loose by regarding writers, distinguished p