Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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 …

. . . 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 …