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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
New Poems, Günter Kunert
New Poems, Günter Kunert
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
New poems. Translated by Leonard Olschner
Fundamentally Grounded [Gründlich Mit Grund], Elke Erb
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
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
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 …
Between Ideologies And A Hard Place: Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Utopian Pragmatist Poetics, Jonathan Monroe
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 …
A Poetics Of Place: Günter Kunert's Poem Sequence "Herbstanbruch In Arkadien", Leonard Olschner
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 …
Introduction To The Special Issue, James Rolleston
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…
Writings From The Margins: German-Jewish Women Poets From The Bukovina, Amy Colin
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
. . . 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 …
"An Affair On Uncertain Ground": Sarah Kirsch's Poetry Volume Erlking 'S Daughter In The Context Of Her Prose After The Wende, Christine Cosentino
"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 …
Footprints Revisited Or "Life In The Changed Space That I Don't Know": Elke Erb's Poetry Since 1989, Barbara Mabee
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 …
Modernism And Metamorphosis: Karin Kiwus' Das Chinesische Examen, James Rolleston
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.