Sujetos de rendimiento y autooptimización en la narrativa alemana contemporánea: wir schlafen nicht (2004) de Kathrin Röggla y Das Schiff das singend zieht auf seiner Bahn (2013) de Philipp Schönthaler

Abstract

The productive logics of capitalism have increasingly occupied spheres originally alien to the working world, gradually dissolving the barriers between working time and leisure time or private life. Two related concepts express the subjective internalization of the processes of productive rationalization in the context of the new spirit of capitalism: ‘performance society’ and ‘self-optimization’. Building on a renewed interest in German writing in the contemporary world of work, an increasing number of novels have analysed the extension of this optimizing and performance driven logic into the everyday and private sphere, with wir schlafen nicht (2004) by Kathrin Röggla and Das Schiff das singend zieht auf seiner Bahn (2013) by Philipp Schönthaler being paradigmatic examples of this. This trend, however, has not yet received attention in Spanish speaking German studies.

Keywords

• röggla
• schönthaler
• self-optimization
• performance society
• new spirit of capitalism