Suchergebnisse

This essay considers German 'Naturlyrik' in terms of factors contributing to the mid-century emergence of political ecopoetry and 21st-century post-pastoral register. Cold War aesthetic experimentation connected with environmental concerns as poets, anthologists, and scholars bridged ideological differences by acknowledging shared values in relation to nature and environment. Material ecocriticism theory provides insight into how during the Cold War the lyric genre became the first to reclaim nature as a place of refuge, then protested the specter of an uninhabitable world, and eventually responded to humanly shaped nature. Work by poets Hans-Jürgen Heise, Peter Huchel, Wulf Kirsten, Ulrike Almut Sandig, and others is discussed.

German poetry has been obsessed with concepts and images of the future for decades. The present article concentrates on the pertinent contributions by the two leading German poets, Günter Kunert and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and their lyrical output since the late 1980s. What they portray is, on the whole, a rather gloomy picture, albeit not without a bit of redeemding irony.

The article considers a question mainly unexplored — the history of German book art of the 18th century. There are outlined the main trends in the evolution of German books and highlighted their stylistic varieties. The "archaic" style, inherited from the 17th century, has its characteristic disharmony, rough types, and eclectic ornamenting. It remains relevant until the 1770s. From the 1730s, a style called here the "Leipzig classic" strives to overcome the limitations of the archaic. Its development is related to the partnership of the poet J.C. Gottsched and the publisher B.K. Breitkopf, and to the short period in German literature when classical standards prevailed. Probably, the Leipzig publishers' practice directly affected the Russian book style of the third quarter of 18th century. In the 1750s, the literary program of the writer J.J. Bodmer and the circle of Zurich writers, opponents of J.C. Gottsched, fused with the publishing program associated with an attempt of some fundamental reforms. Bodmer himself, and later the poet Salomon Gessner, were co-owners of the largest Zurich publishing company. Through that, the original "Zurich" style appeared, heralding the future book "empire" style. Its most characteristic features are the Roman-faced type instead of the Gothic type and the lack of ornamentation. The end of the century typography is marked by some further evolution of the "Leipzig classic" style, the Gothic type standardization, and later the Roman-faced type standardization as well ("Walbaum" type). Consequently, German books of the 18th century represent a complex and uneven evolution, with huge regional differences and directly or indirectly related to the development of national literature, which is a phenomenon that cannot be observed in other European countries.

This study is an introduction to the body of work produced by the German poets who were born during or after World War II in Romania and whose almost simultaneous debut lies in the relatively liberal period 1965 – 1971. Helped onto the Romanian-German literary scene by a propitious environment and informed by the socialist ideology they were born "into," the poets born between 1942 and 1955 formed a remarkable generation unit which sought to significantly renew German-language literature in Romania. Rejecting identification with the insulary Romanian-German communities, the young poets strove to create a socially and politically relevant verse expressing an urban and cosmopolitan attitude. The growing nationalist rhetoric and isolationist stance of Romania's regime and the material and psychological hardships endured by its population through the 1970s and 80s forced the generation to revise its incipient enthusiasm for Romanian socialism. Increasingly, the poets' work came to depict the threatened existence of the German minority and the harsh general living conditions in Romania and to provide an alternative to the absurd official proclamations of a "golden age" under Ceauşescu, despite the poetry's growing reliance on obscuring literary techniques. The emigration of most of the generation members in the mid to late 1980s brought about the eventual unravelling of the generation unit and marks the end of my study. By following the evolution of three themes – social and political engagement, the German minority, and the urban environment – which define the poets as a generation throughout their literary careers in Romania, the analysis illuminates not only the generation's development from identification with Romanian socialism and rejection of the German minority to criticism of the country's policies and a renewed interest in the fate of the German community but also the changing possibilities and limits of literary expression under communism. In addition to providing an introduction to the body of work created by the 1970s generation in Romania, the study also expands the understanding of German literature in the 20th century by providing new material on literature written under totalitarianism and of intercultural German literature.

This dissertation focuses on what art in general and poetry in particular can reveal about sociopolitical history, and on the possible significance of such knowledge or understanding for human subjectivity and ethical-political agency. Following Marxian-inflected theory my claim is that the assumption that poetry and the other arts do not differ, first from already-conceptualized, purpose-driven thought, and then from actual action, is not only dangerously delusional, but also ignores the most radical potential of poetry. Poetry is an imaginative construction that is felt to be as if it were already an objective truth, als ob, in Kant's terms, but is in fact something not yet actually proven to be objective. This in turn makes aesthetic experience imaginatively and affectively available to us without the conceptual constraints that delimit objectively-oriented thought and action in the real, empirical world itself. It is in this sense that art allows for the activation of subjectivity and agency not already known and stipulated. More specifically, this dissertation identifies the role that Jewish poets ascribed to modern Hebrew and Yiddish poetry from a perspective wrought through a rich engagement with German literary culture. I show how both Yiddish and Hebrew modernist poetry provides and records unique evidence of historical experience. This study also examines how and why modern Hebrew Israeli poetry is haunted by the possibility that the newly established state of Israel might be moving away catastrophically from the imperative to achieve a genuinely democratic configuration. Finally, it examines how and why this legacy of critical examination of the sociopolitical reality still suffuses the aesthetic vocations of Israeli poetry today. This project follows three main routes. The first is an exploration of the work of the Yiddish poet Moyshe-Leyb Halpern (1886-1932), read in light of its engagement with the poetry of Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), the poet Halpern admired most; the second is a comparative study of David Avidan's poetry, and to a lesser extent Natan Zach's, with the poetry and thought of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) and, through Brecht, Heine again; the third route is a study of the concept of poetry promoted by the American-born contemporary Israeli poet, Harold Schimmel (b.1935), in light of both Frankfurt School aesthetics and Halpern's poetics. The complex constellation of poetic works and histories that this dissertation undertakes reveals how poetry emerges out of self-other relations, and in what ways these dynamics facilitate an agency effect, that is, an agency that is never already established, but is always coming into being. It is this notion of felt-agency, I further show, that is vital for the establishment a non-violent public sphere, one that is urgently needed today.