The Aesthetic Modernity In Berlin Period Of Herta MüLler's Writings

Retroactively departing from the Romanian-themed works of her Berlin period,this paper focuses on the linkage between Herta Müller's work and her intellectual development,highlighting the influences from the neo-Marxist literary group Aktionsgruppe-Banat and the German literary tradition.Among the Germany writers,Walter Benjamin's method of literary montage had exerted a decisive significance on Müller's writing,as evidenced from her own literary theory and her novels in her Berlin period.Karl Marx's historical materialism and Georg Simmel's aesthetic sociology play an important role in Müller's writings,which concludes that the symptom of Müller's writing in the Berlin period serves as the aesthetic modernity.Simmel's aesthetic modernity inherits and promotes Marx's critical theory on modernity,both of which come to an agreement that the analysis among the objective culture,realistic individual and the capital logic emphasizes on the importance of particular perceptual practice.It is Marx who initiates the totality on the aesthetic modernity,which leads to Simmel's proposal of aesthetic sociology: individuality has been made through distance and adventure.Meanwhile,Simmel points out the hope of the crisis of modernity relies on women's culture.Müller's oeuvre was derived from her individual perception,and she translates her Romanian-themed writings into a new perception-phenomenon relativity.Meanwhile,she proposes the literary criticism of her own: one firmly grasps the mobility of modern being(time-space-experience)within the vast temporal and spatial scopes.One experiences der fremde Blick(the foreign gaze)through the distance with the reality,while the form of the spiritual adventure/writing tends to present die erfundene Wahrnehmung(the invented perception)from the blurred boundary.By so doing,this enables the reader to perceive the heterogeneity from Herta Müller's writing—the way of how the individual experience was limited on the one hand and yet opened on the other.Müller's Berlin novels,Traveling on One-leg and The Appointment in particular,in which the literary techniques of bricolage and flashbacks are employed,significantly display Benjamin's method of literary montage.Particularly in the interaction between third-person narration and city space,as well as the rapport between first-person narrationand inner time,Müller claims how this personal-experience-based writing expresses the aesthetic essence of modern life and discloses her aesthetic efforts made to correct the humanity imbalance caused by the excess of reason.Müller's writing itself can be considered a particular perceptual practice,which inspires us to think about how individuals lead their lives at their moments.