Reflections on the Life and Work of the 2009 Nobel Prize-winning Writer, Herta Müller

A talk celebrating the naming of Herta Mueller's as the 2009 Nobel Prize Awardee for Literature…

Müller was born in 1953 in the German-speaking town Nitzkydorf in Banat, Romania. She studied German and Romanian literature at the university in Timişoara (Temeswar), Romania. During her university years, she was associated with Aktionsgruppe Banat, a circle of young German-speaking authors who, in opposition to Ceauşescu’s dictatorship, sought freedom of speech. She worked for a couple of years as a translator, but was dismissed when she refused to be an informant for the secret police. She made her literary debut with the collection of short stories Niederungen (1982), which was censored in Romania. Two years later, she published Drückender Tango. In these two works, Müller depicts life in a small, German-speaking village and the corruption, intolerance and repression to be found there. The Romanian national press was very critical of these works while the German press received them very positively. In 1987, Müller emigrated together with her husband, author Richard Wagner. In novels published between 1992 and 2001, including The Land of Green Plums (1996) and The Appointment (2001), she paints a portrait of daily life in a stagnated dictatorship. (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2009/bio-bibl.html)

Ileana Orlich is the director of the Romanian studies program and professor of Romanian Studies and Comparative Literature in the German, Romanian, and Slavic Faculty of the Arizona State University School of International Letters and Cultures (SILC). She also directs the Central European Cultural Collaborative at ASU and the ASU Summer Program in Romania and Central Europe. Her most recent book, Myth and Modernity in the Twentieth-Century Romanian Novel (New York: Columbia University Press) is forthcoming in 2009. Orlich’s most recent articles, “Rewriting Chekhov for Postmodern Theatre: Nic Ularu’s The Cherry Orchard, Sequel” in Alloquor (Iasi: Studia Humanitatis Iassyensia) and “Picture and Text in Henry James’s Daisy Miller” in Analele Universitatii Ovidius (Constanta: Editura Universitatii Ovidius), are both forthcoming in fall 2009. Her awards include the 2006 ASU Professor of the Year Special Recognition Award; the 2004 Medalia Ordinul Cultural al Romaniei, Ofiter, Categoria A; the 2004 Translation Prize of Romania’s Institute of Culture; and the 2001 ASU Centennial Professor Award.

The event is cosponsored by the ASU Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies and the Romanian studies program in the ASU School of International Letters and Cultures.