Litrary Strategies For The Public Success Of Florian Illie's Generation Golf And Jana Hensel's Zonenkinder

The present thesis is based on the theories of the social conditionality of the memory from Maurice Halbwachs and the viewpoints of Aleida Assmann about the generational memory and the function of the literary as a medium of memory and tries to find out and analyzes the literary strategies in the books Generation Golf of Florian lilies and Zonenkinder of Jana Hensel in order to determine the effects of these literary strategies on the generational identification for the readers and the factors for the public success of both books.At the end of the last century,many literary writers in the German literature world began to reflect how to define their own generation.In particular,the 70s generation has made many attempts.But these attempts can not accepted by lots of people.They are not like the 68-generation who strongly influenced by politics and the ideology.It is difficult to find a label for the 70s generation.Until Florian lilies published the book Generation Golf in the year 2001 and Jana Hensel the book Zonenkinder in the year 2005,the most reader accepted the two works as representative memory books of the 70s generation from the former FRG and GDR.For historical reasons,the contents of both books differ widely.One describes a wealthy and carefree West German childhood and youth.The other contains the life experiences of an East German who have experienced the East German as well as the West German system and have experienced the great historical event of the fall of the Berlin wall.But they both have attracted great attention.The present thesis aims at the introduction of the appearance and feedback of both books and tries to find their success factors from the literary strategic perspective.The core questions of this work are:Which literary strategies are used in both works?Do they have something in common or do they differ widely?What kind of relationship do these strategies and the memory texts have?Do they also affect the generations' identification among the readers?In the second part after the introduction,the theoretical framework is summarized.According to Maurice Halbwachs,memory is socially conditioned.Aleida Assman thinks that everyone is taking part in the key experiences of the whole society and that becomes a label of the whole generation.These experiences can be recorded in the memory texts.Literature serves as a medium of memory in this sense.The selection and use of literary strategies can affect the text in such a way that it has an experiential,monumental,historical,antagonistic or reflexive mode.On the basis of these theories,a total of five important literary strategies are summarized in the fourth part of the present thesis:autobiographical writing,the mixture of fiction and facticity,the similarities in the composition of the text,the change of the narrative instance of I and We and the reconstruction methods of the past.Autobiographical writing means that the texts float between a biography and a literary text.This not only enables the readers to read the life experiences passively of the other people.Rather,it also provides a great room for the readers to reflect themselves.The mixture of fiction and facticity of the texts is caused by the vagueness of the text type.The fictive part of the texts stands for the experiences of the contemporaries and the typical social events of that generation.Thus,the authors have created a space for the collective and generational memories.Two important similarities on the text structure are summarized in the two books.Firstly the childhood and youthful experiences are written according to subject areas.These everyday topics can directly affect the readers,that they can more easily remember their own childhood and past time.Secondly is the pendulum between then and now.The alternating description of the past and the present can cause the readers to recall their memories to the lost time and to arouse the reflection on their identification.The alternating application of I and We gives the texts on one side the character of the factuality of the biography.And on the other hand the readers can feel addressed to the narrative person We.This greatly contributes to the fact that the texts tend to be reflexive.Both authors used the method of reification and archiving concerning reconstruction of the past.The lost names,things,and the lost time are thereby again held before the eyes of the readers,which contributes to the identification with the generation image,which is created in the texts.Conclusions are drawn from the analyses in the fourth part that the five literary strategies together have affected the texts to present a reflexive mode,which is directed target at the reader.It is the important cause of the public success of both books.