Really Existing Utopias: Co-Creative Authorship in the Literary Works of 20th and 21st-Century German-Language Women Writers

This article focuses on the deliberate turn to co-creative practices by contem- porary women writing in German.Drawing on extensive original interview material with Ulrike Draesner (b.1962) and Ulrike Almut Sandig (b.1979), it explores how these authors articulate the human interactions that happen in and around literature.Through their authorial practices Draesner and Sandig hold open a utopian space, but less in the sense of political content and more in the sense of epistemic structures that have the potential to unlock different ways of being.This argument is developed with reference to their work and to that of a number of contemporaries,including Felicitas Hoppe (b.1960) and Sharon Dodua Otoo (b.1972).The timeliness of the wider social echo and related aesthetic opportunities afforded by these prac- tices is underscored by a consideration of the creative work of Gisela Elsner (1937-1992), a writer of the previous generation.