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Avant-gardist, Mediator, and...Mentor? Elke Erb
- Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature & Culture
- University of Nebraska Press
- Volume 13, 1997
- pp. 123-132
- 10.1353/wgy.1997.0005
- Article
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This examination of Elke's Erb's texts and the interview that follows it seek an answer to the question of why most GDR women writers vehemently rejected the label "feminist author," even when they explicitly deal with gender issues in their texts. As poet and theoretician, but also as mediator between different generations and literatures, Elke Erb continues to receive much attention, particularly from young authors. Her way of dealing with gender questions, on the one hand, and with a politically understood feminism, on the other, exemplifies her own ambivalence about the issue of gender-specific writing. At the same time, she displaces some of the familiar feminist questions, rejects them, breaks them down, and appropriates them for herself in original ways. (BD)