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This article considers how literature reaches a variety of different audiences and can effect practical change within a wider social ecosystem through the concepts of the 'wood wide web' and 'thinking mycorrhizally', developed here as part of a pragmatic 'sympoietics' of action. I first set out how these terms, stemming initially from forest ecology research and environmental humanities respectively, allow us to conceptualize literary texts as an epistemological species that both draws on and further contributes to our understanding of interspecies communication. What is at stake is therefore not just how we might live together in a broken world but how we might know about this living together and seek to do so in a more systemically just way. This particular kind of relationality is explored through the case study of contemporary German author, poet and performer, Ulrike Almut Sandig and her remediation of stories by the Brothers Grimm and the different kinds of communication that follow. The different routes for literature thus explored have repercussions for the role of the literary critic and his or her remediation of literary networks around the globe. These repercussions are teased out with an eye to very practical applications of literature, and the expertise of the literary scholar, in a variety of non-literary contexts but with a particular focus on working with professional government and community-based decision makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article leans on the dialogic exchange between Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman in Sex, or the Unbearable (2013) as a theoretical springboard for a reading of two of Ulrich Seidl's Paradies trilogy films — Paradies: Liebe (2012) and Paradies: Glaube (2012) — to consider the role sex plays as a site of relationality in both. In connecting sex and the unbearable, Berlant and Edelman suggest that sex has both anchoring and disrupting properties. Bearing this duality in mind, I focus on the two middle-aged, female protagonists we encounter in the films, respectively a sex tourist and a sexually repressed Catholic proselytizer. I propose that through their experiences the films stage encounters with the unbearable. However, the unbearable is not connected to the depiction of sex per se; rather, it emerges from the various relational bonds between the protagonists. Advancing the notion of toxic symbiosis, I argue that relationality in Seidl's films is ambiguous: it can be beneficial for the characters and yet it is also a sign of their exploitation. Relationality thus troubles the reproduction of a social order that is steeped in a normative understanding of (corporeal) relations as constructive, supportive and worthwhile. Sex in Seidl's films is divorced from hegemonic meaning-making, underscoring resistance to totality, independence and control in scenes of relationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following article explores relational perspectives in Ohrfeige, a novel by writer and former Iraqi refugee, Abbas Khider, and the essay collection, The Displaced, edited by the writer and former refugee from Vietnam, Viet Thanh Nguyen. Drawing on Judith Butler's relational ontology, the article discusses how these narratives critically intervene in today's climate of anti-immigrant rhetoric and intensified border enforcement as they re-humanize refugees, de-essentialize refugee vulnerability, disentangle vulnerability from passivity, and formulate nonviolent positions of resistance, protest and demand. Particular focus is paid to grotesque figurations of corporeality that demonstrate relational vulnerability and simultaneously function as a powerful mode for mourning and protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution focuses on the search for wellbeing at a time of the profound crisis of the Anthropocene, which demands that we move away from concepts of personal happiness and begin to imagine a more sustainable, relational wellbeing that includes both human and non-human partners. It argues that in this context female midlife is a fascinating terrain, which highlights the tension between the idea of happiness as a product of individual choice and the indisputable fact of our dependence on others. This article takes two recent German-language novels and explores the contrasting ways in which they figure their protagonist's search for happiness in midlife. Austrian writer Doris Knecht's Eine vollständige Liste aller Dinge, die ich vergessen hatte (2023) centres on a female protagonist who has experienced personal challenges and seeks to find greater happiness in middle age. Although Knecht's novel reveals happiness as a social construct, it ultimately remains entangled in the inward-looking logic of happiness and a good life as the product of individualist optimization. By contrast, German author Judith Hermann's Daheim (2021) situates the protagonist's search for happiness in midlife as part of a broader context of social and environmental crisis and tentatively suggests the potential for a relational wellbeing based in an awareness of the interdependence of humans and the natural world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of artistic grief work in the 2014 text assemblage Blumen für Otello by contemporary German Jewish artist and activist Esther Dischereit. Dischereit's work offers a complex engagement with racialized violence in post-unification Germany, tackling the murders perpetrated by the Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (National Socialist Underground, NSU) between 2000 and 2007. In their response to the crimes, the German authorities wilfully obstructed investigative efforts and ultimately failed to deliver justice. This situation was exacerbated by a public and media discourse that consistently trivialized the crimes and dehumanized their victims. Against this backdrop, Dischereit's text offers an artistic intervention into the hierarchies of 'grievability' (Butler) and care that enabled such failures in the first place. Drawing on theorists Judith Butler, Çiğdem Inan and Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, I propose that Blumen für Otello develops and champions an aesthetics, ethics and politics of dispossession. Employing strategies of transveral affectation and mourning, multi-layered translation and post-catastrophic improvisation, Dischereit's approach has the potential to undo the division between grievable and ungrievable lives. As such, it may foster reparative modes of agency and relationality that enable the (re-)construction of alternative fields of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Özlem Özgül Dündar's debut poetry collection gedanken zerren (2018) explores what it means to be an embodied subject. Although some of the poems express the violence of having one's identity ascribed by others, many are also vignettes of seemingly banal interactions that constitute a pre-lingual interconnectedness beyond fixed identities. The poems' innovative form and style equally encourage us to regard language not just as a carrier of meaning, but as a material force, or indeed body, that can generate affective responses in readers. gedanken zerren enables us to imagine different perspectives on the body, engendering an increased awareness of everyday gestures and bodily reactions that indicate our inherent interrelatedness to other bodies. This is not the sovereign subject or absolute individual who is master of their own destiny, but rather a relational self in a body over which they have no totalizing control or complete knowledge. The idea of the body conveyed by gedanken zerren can be theorized through the deconstructivist thinker Jean-Luc Nancy's writing on the body, which illuminates how Dündar's poetry shifts the idea of human subjectivity beyond the hierarchical dualisms that have traditionally defined it, be they gendered, racialized, or a question of subject-object, or mind-body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the Internet is a relational space. It draws on a provocative, multimedia trilogy by German video artist Brenda Lien to analyse the challenges to notions of sovereign subjectivity posed by the digital age. Lien's Call of ... trilogy explores the ambivalences of life on the participatory Internet, deploying at times shocking images of violence to undermine Web 2.0's appealing aesthetics and cheery injunctions to its users to self-optimize and so gain personal sovereignty. The Internet's spread in the 1990s into mass consumer use coincided with conservative ideologies aimed at promoting the 'sovereign individual' (Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, 2008), capable of profiting in the dotcom era from neoliberal codes of conduct and low regulations. Since then, dataveillance via Internet platforms has grown to reduce technology users' agency and privacy, framing Internet connectivity as a forcibly relational state, despite the individualist self-optimization opportunities it offers. The article reveals networked connectivity as an ambivalent mode of relationality, both necessary due to the communication and affiliation the Internet makes possible, and worrisome due to the connection it forces between technology users and corporations, unanswerably profiting from human needs in a way that challenges the sovereignty of the networked subject radically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philipp Weiss's five-volume debut novel Am Weltenrand sitzen die Menschen und lachen (2018) features five contrasting protagonists who navigate fractured relationships amid the damaged lifeworlds of industrial modernity, the atomizing tendencies of global capitalism and the pitfalls of ever-optimizing virtuality. This article reads Am Weltenrand as Anthropocene literature, showing how the difficulty and necessity of forming and sustaining close interpersonal and interspecies relationships are central concerns for Weiss in his exploration of the Anthropocene predicament. Across its five volumes, the pentalogy portrays vexed relationality — from missed meetings and misunderstandings to conflicts and failures to relate — as a symptom and effect of ecological crisis. In response to ecological crisis and climate breakdown, Am Weltenrand counters radical pessimism with a renewed emphasis on relationality and dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how Katharina Hacker's 2022 novel Die Gäste experiments with interspecies relations that upend the anthropocentric view of planetary life to bring into view an ethics of narrative hospitality. Focusing on the role of the animals, especially the rat protagonists, I argue that the novel employs anthropomorphism to refute the reductive view of the rat as a lower-order animal without cognition and emotions, while also rejecting the common allegorization of the animal protagonist as a human actor in animal disguise. Drawing on the Kayser versus Bahktin debate of the grotesque in dialogue with posthumanist theories, the article shows how Hacker combines the carnivalesque strand of the grotesque with anecdotal rendition as narrative modes that make possible the kind of interspecies assemblages that posthumanism advocates. By inviting the reader 'to think like a rat', the novel explores ways of overcoming speciecism and human exceptionalism in favour of an entangled and relational world view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Navid Kermani's novel Dein Name (2011) involves the narrator's attempt to record in writing everything that happens to him from a certain date, be it thinking about literature, doing household chores, travelling abroad as a reporter, or honouring the deaths of acquaintances. As a whole, this giant novel conveys a multifaceted sense of subjectivity so fundamentally determined by its relationality that it must remain ungraspable. However, Kermani does not merely suggest a world of incommensurable differences, atomisation and alienation, even from ourselves; he also explores forms of openness to difference beyond hierarchical ideas of tolerance and integration. In this regard, the central role that others play in the formation of the narrator's subjectivity and how this is marked by a series of obituaries leads to the radical re-evaluation of the lives that are deemed to be grievable. The relational understanding of subjectivity that Kermani conveys and the central role of grief in the novel resonate with the thinking of Judith Butler, whose writing on these topics also tries to understand how the subject is formed through multiple relations with others and what this means for an ethical understanding of community. The link between a de-centred understanding of the subject and grievability in Dein Name has implications for our understanding of cosmopolitanism, as, through an emphasis on the imagination and on creative engagement with the world, the novel tries to reconcile the lack of any fixed ground and stable meaning on the one hand, with the need for understanding and some form of ground, however contingent and contestable, on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'The new walls of Europe reflect crises in Europe's relation to itself and the world' (Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, preface to the 2017 edition). In Germany, Austria and Switzerland, as elsewhere, populism has been on the rise, and far-right discourse has altered the political landscape. Should we respond with a re-thinking of community or is 'community' itself part of the problem? Can an ethics of alterity (which we find in Levinas) help re-define what we understand by community? As early as 1924, in Grenzen der Gemeinschaft, Helmuth Plessner warned that 'too much' community, far from being positive in an egalitarian sense, can foster aggressive identity-based 'us-versus-them' political sentiment. Plessner, in his major work, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch (1928) develops his idea of 'positionality' and what we might describe as looking at human beings as 'in-between' creatures, bordering on other animals, connected to each other socially, culturally, politically, but also separate. Plessner is searching for a new way of looking at 'borders' — boundaries between connectedness and separation. Almost one hundred years after Plessner's publications, I will argue that they still offer a valuable perspective on the theme of 'border' and one which may help counter the aggressiveness of contemporary western discourse on borders. In my contribution, I will also draw on thinkers from the phenomenological tradition ranging from Bernhard Waldenfels, who has written of the merits of what he calls the 'Stachel' of the other, to Emmanuel Levinas's ethics of alterity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]