Abstract

In this article Teresa Ludden highlights what she sees as a concern in Anne Duden’s early prose work, particularly Übergang (1982), with marginal perspectives and spaces which have been left out of cultural norms. Using concepts of difference informed by Nietzsche and Irigaray, she examines what she perceives to be Duden’s interest in that which cannot be subsumed under fixed concepts and an attempt to write the specificities of different sorts of selves and bodies. Ludden shows how these selves and bodies cannot adequately be understood by reference to a concept of a universal and unified transcendental subject. She focuses particularly on Duden’s textual strategies for writing these differences, for example her recourse to painting to invent a different language and her use of figures and images which ‘embody’ or symbolise difference, which are imitations of that which cannot be heard in Western culture but is nevertheless present.