<\/p>\n
Prevailing genre-based accounts frequently underscore the tentative and exploratory nature of the essay. In light of this, the dissertation examines various modes of interfering writing in the essays of Joan Didion and Audre Lorde. Moving beyond a purely activist understanding of intervention, the study approaches these essayistic practices through the combined use of cultural-theoretical perspectives and close textual analysis, treating them as situated cultural practices. The interweaving of aesthetic, epistemic, political, ethical, and affective axes in these modes of writing give rise to their capacity to shape, unsettle, transform, and at times stabilize formations of social perception. The central concern of the dissertation is the way Didion and Lorde write about others in their essays, how these others are staged and addressed, and the political and ethical implications that emerge from these specific modes of writing.<\/p>\n
The analysis of Didion\u2019s and Lorde\u2019s essays reveals two markedly different configurations of interfering writing. Didion\u2019s essays frequently employ a covert method, producing aesthetically mediated yet subcutaneously political textual constellations. Through particular montages of scenes and images, aesthetic particularization and control, rhetorical depoliticization, and affective austerity, her texts stage social reality in ways that bind its legibility to ideological presuppositions. Interference thus takes place less through explicit argumentation and more through the aesthetic organization of perception, omissions, implicit interpretive framings, and the regulation of what is rendered representable and political at all. While the inscribed mode of distance can be read as a meaningful configuration from gender-theoretical and empathy-theoretical perspectives, the dissertation delineates its ethical limits, particularly where represented others are fixed as such while being denied a textual relation of response.<\/p>\n
Lorde\u2019s essayistic work, in contrast, exhibits an assertive yet relationally addressing mode of interference oriented toward transformation. Her essayistic forms of writing and speaking combine critical, accusatory, and confrontational gestures with caring modes of address and invocation that imagine social relations and possible futures. Within these modes of interference, marginalized forms of knowledge and feeling are reclaimed and reconceptualized. Particular attention is given to Lorde\u2019s writing modes of affects, especially those engaging Black women\u2019s anger, as well as to her essayistic forms of remembrance and advocacy. Across these configurations, Lorde develops a distinct chronopolitical entanglement of past, present, and future, while at the same time establishing a textual form of relationality that can be read as an ethics of address.<\/p>\n
By bringing Didion and Lorde into a shared constellation, the dissertation proposes two sharply divergent models of interfering writing and proposes a pluralized understanding of the essay. This study makes a significant contribution both to research on the aesthetics, politics, and ethics of writing about and toward others and to essay studies more broadly. Eurocentric and normatively restricted conceptions of the genre are critically examined, marginalized essayistic forms are inscribed into the genre discourse on equal terms, and the essay is reconsidered as a cultural practice of interference.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Prevailing genre-based accounts frequently underscore the tentative and exploratory nature of the essay. In light of this, the dissertation examines various modes of interfering writing in the essays of Joan Didion and Audre Lorde. Moving beyond a purely activist understanding of intervention, the study approaches these essayistic practices through the combined use of cultural-theoretical perspectives and close textual analysis, treating them as situated cultural practices. The interweaving of aesthetic, epistemic, political, ethical, and affective axes in these modes of writing give rise to their capacity to shape, unsettle, transform, and at times stabilize formations of social perception.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":2797,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-forschung"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aesthetik.hu-berlin.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aesthetik.hu-berlin.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aesthetik.hu-berlin.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aesthetik.hu-berlin.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aesthetik.hu-berlin.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2795"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.aesthetik.hu-berlin.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3793,"href":"https:\/\/www.aesthetik.hu-berlin.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2795\/revisions\/3793"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aesthetik.hu-berlin.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aesthetik.hu-berlin.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aesthetik.hu-berlin.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aesthetik.hu-berlin.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}