Walter Abish

Walter Abish (born December 24, 1931 in Vienna ) is an American writer . He is considered one of the most important representatives of American postmodernism .

The cornerstones of his novels so far are foreign countries and their cultures. He himself never visited Mexico or Germany before the books were finished. A topographically realistic representation can therefore never have been his goal. Rather, it seemed to him to be about depriving language of its reality-constituting power. Fascinated by the strangeness of the places, the readers are also influenced by these feelings and thus captivated. Both the fascination with foreign topographies and the constructive nature of the texts can be explained biographically.

Life

As the child of a Jewish merchant family in Vienna, Walter Abish left his homeland after Austria's annexation to the German Reich in 1938. The family emigrated to Shanghai via Italy and Nice in 1940 ; that was also possible without a visa. He left China in 1949 and then lived in Israel , where Walter Abish also did military service. He went to England in 1956 and settled in the USA in 1957. He has been an American citizen since 1960. Abish has taught at Columbia University , Brown University and Yale University , among others .

Studying architecture in Israel might explain why his Houses of Fiction ( Henry James ) look like designs constructed on the drawing board. Abish was honored with the PEN / Faulkner Award for the novel How German Is It - Wie Deutsch ist es es .

Abish is married to photographer and conceptual artist Cecile Abish , with whom he published the book 99, the New Meaning . She also made the cover of How German Is It .

In 1987 he was a MacArthur Fellow . In 1998 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Works

• Duel Site , Tibor de Nagy Editions, New York, 1970. Poems, 28 pages, 300 copies.
• Alphabetical Africa , New Directions, New York, 1974
  • Alphabetical Africa , translated by Jürg Laederach , Urs Engeler Verlag, Basel, 2002
• Minds Meet , New Directions, New York, 1975
  • It's not an accident. Stories 1971 - 1975 , Hohenheim-Edition Maschke, Cologne 1982. Repr. Als: This is no coincidence , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt, 1987
• In the Future Perfect , New Directions, New York, 1977
  • Across the big nothing , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt, 1983
• How German Is It, New Directions, New York, 1980
  • • In the English Garden , Fiction International , No. 4/5, 1975, pp. 35-49
    • The Idea of ​​Switzerland , Partisan Review , Vol. 47, 1980, pp. 57-81. (Preliminary work)
  • How German is it , Hohenheim Edition Maschke , Cologne 1982
• 99, The New Meaning , Burning Deck Press, Providence, Rhode Island, 1990
  • 99, the new sense , Literarisches Colloquium Berlin , Berlin, 1990
• Eclipse Fever , Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1993
  • Sonnenfieber , Rowohlt, Reinbek 1994
• Double vision. A Self Portrait , Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2004. Memories.

Essays

• Self-portrait . In: Individuals: Post-Movement Art in America , Alan Sondheim (Ed.), Dutton, New York, 1977.
• The Writer-To-Be: An Impression of Living . In: Sub-Stance , No. 27, 1980

Interviews

• Jerome Klinkowitz, The Life of Fiction , University of Illinois Press, 1977, pp. 59-71.
• Wie Deutsch Ist Es , Semiotext (e) , No. 4, 1982

literature

• Alain Arias-Masson : The Puzzle of Walter Abish: In the Future Perfect , Sub-Stance , No. 27, 1980.
• Richard Martin: Walter Abish's Inordinate Fictions . In: The contemporary American novel , Gerhard Hoffmann (Ed.), Wilhelm Fink, Munich, 1988, Vol. 3, pp. 7-21.
• JC Schöpp: Breaking out of mimesis: The American novel under the sign of postmodernism . Munich 1990.
• Leonard Orr: Walter Abish , in: Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists , Joel Shatzky u. Michael Taub, Eds, Westport, Conn .: Greenwood, 1997, P, 1-7 (with very good bibliography, English).
• Robert Leucht: 99 ways to invent the self and the world. Walter Abish: Materials and Analyzes . Bonn 2008, ISBN 978-3-938803-05-9 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Walter Abish in the catalog of the German National Library

• Aaron Retica interview, English