Abstract

At the center of most of Hoffmann's fiction stands the Other, often represented as new immigrants, women, people of age, orphans, single parents, and widowers. However, Hoffmann does not only represent his protagonists' alterity; he also makes us experience it through the mere process of reading his texts. It is not only the content of the stories of these Others that makes us recognize their otherness, but rather the formal aspects of the text that cause us to feel estranged and in fact to experience the text itself as "the Other." This unique way of representing alterity is an attempt to capture the experience of the Other, while confronting the reader with the impossibility of fully representing this very experience. Understanding Hoffmann's fiction as an attempt to point at the relation between form and content as a crucial representational tool for the experience of otherness gives meaning to the ambivalence of his prose and takes us beyond the otherwise empty application of the category of postmodernism to his work.

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