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Within the last couple of years Siri Hustvedt has become one of the most productive contemporary American writers of fiction. Nevertheless, only slowly literary scholarship pays adequate attention to her complex narratives. This study aims to fill this gap by interpreting all her to date published novels from an approach termed “literary visuality,” a theoretical framework that combines concepts of intermediality and ekphrasis with a phenomenological perspective. Hustvedt’s novels are analyzed in a way that allows to draw conclusions concerning the development of Hustvedt’s prose oeuvre but also to locate her work in the context of contemporary American literature. The study argues that through Hustvedt’s stimulation of the visual sense by means of detailed descriptive passages, the texts acquire an aesthetic dimension that oscillates between the static and the dynamic. Moreover these descriptions serve as instructions for acts of visualization in the reader, one of the central reasons for the increasing appeal of Hustvedt’s novels.

This collection comprises essays from various interdisciplinary perspectives – e. g. literary scholarship, intermediality, art history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and medicine – to analyze and interpret the fictional and non-fictional works by Siri Hustvedt, an author whose reputation and public presence have been growing steadily in the 21st century and who is recognized as one of the most widely read and appreciated contemporary American writers. In her significance and stature as a public intellectual, she is not merely an American writer but a transnational, cosmopolitan author, who develops new forms not only of literary narrative but of interdisciplinary thought and writing, bringing together otherwise separated genres and branches of knowledge in a broad spectrum between literature and philosophy, historiography and art, psychoanalysis and neuroscience, narrative and medicine. The present volume is structured into the parts “Literary Creation and Communication,” Psychoanalysis and Philosophy,” “Medicine and Narrative,” “Vision, Perception, and Power,” and “Trauma, Memory, and the Ambiguities of Self” and closes with an interview of Siri Hustvedt by Susanne Becker in which Hustvedt elucidates her personal conception of her own creative processes of writing.

Dieser Band behandelt aus interdisziplinärer und transnationaler Perspektive die Zusammenhänge zwischen Exilerfahrung und Zensurmechanismen. Er versammelt literatur- und sprachwissenschaftliche Beiträge, die den Themenkomplex aus komparativer, historischer, politischer und kreativer Perspektive beleuchten. Dabei werden die Kontinuitäten und Diskontinuitäten der Exilliteraturforschung, der Entstehung verschiedener Formen von Exilliteratur und Zensurpraktiken als institutionalisierte Form der Unterdrückung freier Meinungsäußerung und künstlerischer Freiheit in Beziehung zueinander gesetzt. Der Band stellt somit einen in bedeutenden Beitrag zur theoretisch wie auch anwendungsbezogenen Zensur- und Exilforschung dar.