Paper short abstract:

In drawing on arts-based experimentation inspired by concrete poetry and Fluxus I I explore if and how an imagistic modes of showing can assist us in mediating that which we experience as exceptional. This imaginistic mode will simultaneously relate to and depart from Johnson's novel Jahrestage.

Paper long abstract:

For me, reading Uwe Johnson's four-volume novel Jahrestage constituted an exceptional process and event. There was the excitement of his stylistic experimentation with narrative form, vernacular speech, continuously shifting temporal perspectives, and - perhaps paradoxically - commitment to the reality of fiction. Yet there was also the ability to create what I think of as ancillary memory: a form of memory marked by the ability to move readers beyond the "singular vision" (Hirsch) of always already existent understandings and explanations. This ability was important to me because in 1953 my grandparents, mother, and aunt had fled from the East German Republic. In 1956, Johnson also fled. For all of them, the GDR remained a ghostly reference point. Yet Johnson's experimentations opened up a way to experience the various political and cultural layers of their life in exceptional ways.

In drawing on arts-based experimentation inspired by concrete poetry and Fluxus I I explore if and how an imagistic modes of showing can assist us in mediating that which we experience as exceptional. Exceptional experiences are intensely bodily and deep. In concretely layering fragments of Johnson's writing with paintings, photographs, and other texts that mnemotically and imaginistically attach themselves to scenes from Johnson's Jahrestage, I seek to convey the physicality of the exceptional experience: the jolt - the body's throbbing and pulsations, ecstasies of the mind - that happens when reading Johnson. I also explore a possible mode of ethnographic thinking and description that does not necessarily seek to unearth meaning.