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Reviews Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Culture and Theory

Conley, Verena Andermatt, ed. Rethinking Technologies by Laurence M. Porter

Leitch, Vincent B. Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Poststructuralism by Merry M. Pawlowski

French Studies

Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit. Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais by Thomas Trezise

Boldt-Irons, Leslie Anne. On Bataille: Critical Essays by Walter A. Strauss

Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations. Trans. Martin Joughin by Charles J. Stivale

Fisher, Dominique D. Staging of Language and Language(s) of the Stage: Mallarmé's poëme critique and Artaud's poetry-minus-text by Maryse Fauvel

Goodall, Jane. Artaud and the Gnostic Drama by Claudine G. Fisher

Lydon, Mary. Skirting the Issue: Essays …

Ideology, Family Policy, Production, And (Re)Education: Literary Treatment Of Abortion In The Gdr Of The Early 1980s, Heinz Bulmahn

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The decision by the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe of placing restrictions on the right to an abortion will profoundly affect German women's right to choose. This decision is a culmination of efforts to errode the right to choose for West as well as East German women. In the former GDR, even though liberal abortion laws allowed women access to free abortions, for ideological reasons, the government devised policies that discouraged abortions as a means of birth control. This policy becomes particularly apparent in the early 1980s when the East German government, confronted with a declining birth rate, faced the dilemma …

Narrative And Simultaneity: Benjamin's Image Of Proust, Louis Simon

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

We can better understand Proust's approach to literary activity in A la recherche du temps perdu and Walter Benjamin's reading of the novel in his essay "The Image of Proust" by recognizing how the experience and concept of simultaneity, as opposed to linearity or narrative progression, underlies these texts. Though Proust's novel represents a linear narrative, the writer's activity, which Benjamin characterizes as "the attempt to charge an entire lifetime with the utmost awareness," engages a supralinear dimension of lived experience that binds literary activity to the present moment. Readings of the Benjamin-Proust relationship that focus on an exclusively linear …

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.

Mediamania? Contemporary German Poetry In The Age Of New Information Technologies: Thomas Kling And Durs Grünbein, Erk Grimm

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The essay examines the preoccupation with information technologies as a dominant theme of German poetry in the 1980s and 1990s. Outlining the historical shift from a critique of mass media to the ironic affirmation of hi-tech media, the investigation seeks an understanding of its driving forces. The analysis of Enzensberger's polemical essays on the culture industry shows the parallels and the difference in attitude between him and younger poets of the 1980s. A concise account of their publications illuminates the development of an aesthetically demanding poetry that kept aloof from the mass media. In their rejection of a common quotidian …

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 …

Prose And Poetry, Neil H. Donahue

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Gerhard Falkner, Introduced by Neil Donahue