Institutes
First Annual Festival Neue Literatur
Sunday, March 7, 2010 - Monday, March 8, 2010
Should I stay or should I go? Modes of mobility in contemporary fiction
The first annual Festival Neue Literatur brings some of the best up and coming German-language authors to New York, where they encounter well-known American writers in a series of conversations and readings. This year’s edition centers on the notion of mobility in today’s increasingly globalized world. Many authors in Europe and the United States share an immigrant background and write in languages that are different from what they grew up with. But mobility, or the lack of it, is not only experienced by authors who have arrived and struggled to establish themselves in a new and sometimes hostile society. It is also experienced by writers who long to leave their provincial surroundings but feel they are stuck where they are. Contemporary fiction reflects people who move from one place to another or never at all, showing that, ultimately, mobility is a concept of the mind.
Festival Neue Literatur is a joint project of the Goethe-Institut New York, the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Consulate General of Switzerland in New York, Deutsches Haus NYU, the German Book Office and the German Consulate General New York.
