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Guido Mazzoni. On Modern Poetry. Translated By Zakiya Hanafi. Belknap Press, 2022., Anthony Degenaro

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Guido Mazzoni. On Modern Poetry. Translated by Zakiya Hanafi. Belknap Press, 2022. 294 pp.

Candelas Gala. Clara Janés: La Poética Cuántica O La Física De La Poesía. Csic, 2021., Nicolás Fernández-Medina

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Candelas Gala. Clara Janés: La poética cuántica o la física de la poesía. CSIC, 2021. 203 pp.

Urban Pastoral: Tradition And Innovation In Apollinaire's "Zone" And Rilke's "Zehnte Duineser Elegie", Eleanor E. Ter Horst

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Two early twentieth-century poets, Rainer Maria Rilke and Guillaume Apollinaire, create new relationships to literary traditions and thus reconfigure the meanings of modernity. In Apollinaire's "Zone" and Rilke's "Tenth Duino Elegy," the city represents what is most distincively modern and revolutionary about poetic practice, yet it also provides a link to the literary and historical past. The city in these poems is a site of poetic potentiality, where time is no longer characterized by the rigid separation between past and present, and where space is not geograpically delineated. Through the poets' use of metaphor and apostrophe, which create a suspension …

Prince Eugene And Maria Theresa: Gender, History, And Memory In Hofmannsthal In The First World War , Wolfgang Nehring

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Hugo von Hofmannsthal was one of the Austrian poets and intellectuals who took an active part in the historical-political events of 1914. He expected from the war a new vitality of public life and an end of the cultural crisis. In his early years he had advocated closer bonds between poesy and life. Now he encountered a situation that gave him the chance to strengthen his ties with reality. He worried about the existence of Austria, in which he was rooted, and tried to conjure up the Hapsburg spirit of the past for his contemporaries and to explain Austria's national …

Translating Czernowitz: The “Non-Place” Of East Central Europe, Leslie Morris

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The historian Karl Schlögel’s proclamation that Czernowitz is a “real place” and not just a literary topos serves as the point of departure, and the point of contention, for this essay. This essay examines the rhetorical and textual recreations of Czernowitz as “place” on contemporary maps of Jewish mourning and, specifically, in the work of the Czernowitz-born poet Rose Ausländer. Czernowitz poses an interesting problem for contemporary literary and cultural theory that seeks to map the fault lines between literary text, cultural and historical memory, and geographical and textual sites of memory. This legendary Jewish city, once a part of …

Restaging Hysteria: Mary Wigman As Writer And Dancer , Laura A. Mclary

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Mary Wigman was not only a leading proponent of the early twentieth-century Expressionist dance movement, but also a writer of poetry and short poetic prose. Despite her assertion that dance was beyond language, she wrote often about dance in an attempt to articulate the kinesthetic experience of dance through languages. This interdisciplinary study explores the intersection of dance and writing for Wigman, focusing on gender coding in writing and dance within the context of early twentieth-century dialogues. Despite the pervasive equation of (feminine) hysteria with dance and (masculine) subjectivity with authorship, Wigman engaged in both activities. I argue that Wigman …

New Poems, Günter Kunert

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

New poems. Translated by Leonard Olschner

Between Ideologies And A Hard Place: Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Utopian Pragmatist Poetics, Jonathan Monroe

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The marginalization of poetry in North American culture makes it difficult to appreciate fully on this side of the Atlantic the importance of Hans Magnus Enzensberger's literary and cultural contributions over the past four decades. Working against familiar cultural encodings that would align poetry uncritically with the "personal" and prose with the "political," his oeuvre makes a strong case for poetry and critical prose as vitally complementary activities. In his 1991 collection of poems, Zukunftsmusik (Future Music) and his 1993 prose collection, Civil Wars: From L.A. to Bosnia, Enzensberger renews his longstanding commitment to "the process / of becoming …

"An Affair On Uncertain Ground": Sarah Kirsch's Poetry Volume Erlking 'S Daughter In The Context Of Her Prose After The Wende, Christine Cosentino

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Translated by James Rolleston.

Sarah Kirsch, who in the wake of the Biermann scandal moved from East to West Germany in 1977, is arguably the most talented living German lyric poet. But she is also a prose writer. It seems that since her break with the GDR in 1977 and the breakup of the GDR in 1989, this particular genre has gained importance in her literary output. Her diary-like prose records and blends intense reactions to events of change or collapse, "German brouhaha": political, historical, environmental, existential, and personal. Critics have called Kirsch's prose "lyrical prose" and her latest poetry …

Writings From The Margins: German-Jewish Women Poets From The Bukovina, Amy Colin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Emerging at the crossroads of heterogeneous languages and cultures, German-Jewish women's poetry from the Bukovina displays the characteristics of its fascinating multilingual contextuality, yet it also bears the stigma of a double marginalization, for its representatives became time and again targets of both anti-Semitic attacks as well as gender discrimination. The present essay explores the untiring struggles of German-Jewish women authors from the Bokovina for acceptance within the Jewish and non-Jewish community. It analyzes their attempts to cope with social barriers, prejudices, and their difficult situation as both women and Jews. The essay also sets their poetry against the background …

. . . Und . . . Fried . . . Und . . .: The Poetry Of Erich Fried And The Structure Of Contemporaneity, Nora M. Alter

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay looks at the poetry of Erich Fried in the context of tensions within contemporary cultural studies. Fried's contemporaneity is linked to his status on the margins of various cultures, media, and ideologies—thus making both his life and his works appear as exemplary paradigms for the postmodern condition, with its various theoretical celebrations of "exile," "border crossing," "transgression," "deterritorialization," and so forth. Yet, at the same time, seemingly in contrast with his labile identity is Fried's rigid Marxist political ideological core which surfaces in his political poetry. Focusing, in particular, on Fried's poems directed against the Vietnam War, this …

Fundamentally Grounded [Gründlich Mit Grund], Elke Erb

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Translated by James Rolleston et al.

An East German poet examines her own production in the years 1991-1995. Precise images, e.g. of animals and landscapes both primeval and immediate, are correlated with the precise date and manner of their emergence from the poetic unconscious. The poet's self-questioning is autobiographical, professional, and social: What is the correlation between linguistic work and play and the ongoing transformation of a social order? What do intimate moments and enigmatic images tell us about the new realities of a capitalist collectivity? A key to the meaning of wrenching change is found in Erb's intensive involvement …

Improved Versions: Feminist Poetics And Recent Work By Ulla Hahn And Ursula Krechel, Charlotte Melin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay analyzes how Ulla Hahn and Ursula Krechel in their recent poetry and essays have drawn a connection between feminism and their writing. The feminine/feminist outlook they advance is exemplary for their generation of women authors because they have sought to expand the poetic canon by interrogating assumptions made by modernism. A reappraisal of their poetry suggests that interpretations of their work must take account of the feminist poetics of these authors.

The Intimacy Of Internationalism In The Poetry Of Joachim Sartorius, Neil H. Donahue

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article considers Joachim Sartorius in his various cultural and literary activities as diplomat, administrator, editor, translator, and poet as a possible model for the German intellectual after reunification, and links those activities through the concept of "internationalism," which has shifted in meaning from programmatic politics to an understanding of cultural difference and mediation with an Other, whether as public and private spheres, Self and Other, or Subject and Object. For Sartorius, however, poetry defines most closely or most intimately that notion of mediation, and thus requires 'close' reading. That notion distances him from the 'impersonal' Modernist poetics of Bertolt …

Introduction To The Special Issue, James Rolleston

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Two seemingly superficial questions prompted the initiation of the present extensive survey of contemporary German poetry: what difference has 1989 made to lyrical voices both East and West…

Modernism And Metamorphosis: Karin Kiwus' Das Chinesische Examen, James Rolleston

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

A Chinese examination requires one to record everything felt or recalled within a given time frame. It "tests" an entire life. Karin Kiwus' poetic tools for taking the exam are monumentality, the freezing of imagined history into the dimension of a statue—that then crumbles back into time; and metamorphosis, the subjection of moments and personae to quasi-musical structures of ceaseless variation.

A Poetics Of Place: Günter Kunert's Poem Sequence "Herbstanbruch In Arkadien", Leonard Olschner

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Kunert's volume of poetry Fremd daheim (Foreign at Home, 1990) defines a poetics of place, a poetics that demonstrates continuities in Kunert's lyric texts that reaches from his last years in the GDR, through his years in the old Federal Republic and beyond the Wende of 1989. Here he attempts to determine where the lyrical subject (or voice) is situated with respect to its origins and to trajectories into a future. Some poems thematize a return to the self as a homecoming, since no other homecoming is conceivable, while others commemorate travel and places abroad. The latter become …

Footprints Revisited Or "Life In The Changed Space That I Don't Know": Elke Erb's Poetry Since 1989, Barbara Mabee

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

After the fall of the Wall, the lyrical correspondence of the East German writer Elke Erb with the Austrian experimental writer Friederike Mayröcker proved to be of great significance for Erb's process of reexamining perspectives and constituting a new poetic self. In a close reading of Erb's post-Wende texts, the article discusses Erb's reshaping of her poetic craft against the backdrop of her life in the former GDR and literarty discourses in unified Germany. The analysis of representative poetry focuses on three areas of Erb's poetry collections after 1989: critical reflections on life in the former GDR through linguistically …

Anamnesis: Paul Celan's Translations Of Poetry, Leonard Olschner

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Paul Celan's significance as a poet has long been undisputed, and increasingly outside German-speaking countries, but his translations of poetry have remained at the periphery of critical attention and are only gradually becoming recognized as an integral and indeed major part of his poetry and poetics. The present essay attempts to elucidate specific aspects of the biographical, linguistic, literary and historical background at work in Celan's translating and offers analytic interpretations of texts by Mandel'stam, Apollinaire and Shakespeare in Celan's translation.

The Dialogue Of Absence, Richard Stamelman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The Dialogue of Absence

Paul Celan's Linguistic Mysticism, Shira Wolosky

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Paul Celan's works often seem to grant to language an autonomy that isolates poetic from extra-poetic concerns, including religious ones. The status of language in Celan, however, should be assessed in the context of its status within Judaic mysticism. While the importance of mysticism for Celan has been recognized, the degree to which Judaic mysticism differs from other mystical traditions has been less so. This is especially true with regard to the place given to language in the Kabbalah, and the structures and assumptions that its conception of language implies. Of importance to Celan, for example, is the Kabbalistic notion …

Introduction, James K. Lyon

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Introduction to the special issue on Paul Celan

Ambiguities Of Interpretation: Translating The Late Celan, Nicholas J. Meyerhofer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Celan's later poems are seen as increasingly problematic because of their inherent tension between speaking and not speaking, because of their formalization (semantic and syntactic) of this tension, and also because of Celan's poetic intentionality. The latter, described as a poetics of ambiguity, is the focus of this article. Particular attention is given to the implications such a poetics has for the task of the (English) translator. To illustrate in the concrete this poetics, and to show how its intentional integration of thematic and etymological ambiguity must be taken into account by the translator, two late lyrics ("Einkanter: Rembrandt" and …

Encounters: American Poets On Paul Celan, Various Authors

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The Poetry of Exile. Paul Auster.

Paul Celan: A Memoir and A Poem. Jerome Rothenberg.

Paul Celan. Jed Rasula.

Paul Celan. Cid Corman.

A Note on Paul Celan. Clayton Eshleman.

[Paul Celan.] Jack Hirschman.

The Name Reversed — To Paul Anczel. David Meltzer.

Paul Celan In Translation: "Du Sei Wie Du", John Felstiner

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Translating the lyric poetry of Paul Celan, especially his later poems, carries not only the endemic challenge and difficulty of any verse translation, but the added incentive of doing justice to a writer whose whole recourse after the Holocaust—whose sanctuary, if he was to have any at all—he sought in language itself, specifically in the Muttersprache, the mother tongue that was as well the tongue of those who murdered his mother and father. This essay exposes a process of translating "Du sei wie du" (1970), which perhaps more than any other poem by Celan, at once solicits and defies …

Poetry And The Extremities Of Language: From Concretism To Paul Celan, James K. Lyon

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Despite his disdain for most contemporary German language poets, Paul Celan in his own verse shares and reflects in several ways the attitudes toward language and the possibilities of poetic speech found in the practitioners of so-called "concrete poetry." Skeptical of language that had fallen victim to the "verbicide" of modern usage, each set out to re-create or revitalize language by using it in an anti-metaphorical sense where words, rather than functioning as bearers of meaning, are often employed as unconventional, in some cases anti-referential sign systems that have meaning only in relationship to themselves, but which simultaneously attempt to …

Celan And The "Stumbling Block" Of Mysticism, Joachim Schulze

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In certain poems, Celan uses concepts that derive in part indirectly, in part directly from mystical sources (Gershom Scholem, Meister Eckhart). In other poems, the reader also finds themes related to mysticism. This discovery raises the question of whether one may read these poems as mystical expressions, or whether they should not in fact be viewed instead as "poetic transpositions" of concepts drawn from the "raw material" of mysticism.

Using a specific example, this essay will demonstrate the possibility of reading a poem in a mystical context, i.e. as a mystical expression, and then address the question from two perspectives. …

Paul Celan: A Selected Bibliography Of Recent Secondary Literature, Jerry Glenn

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Paul Celan: A Selected Bibliography of Recent Secondary Literature

Paul Celan In English: A Bibliography Of Primary And Secondary Literature, Jerry Glenn

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Literature of Paul Celan