"The Space of Words"

Exile and Diaspora in the Works of Nelly Sachs
UK
ISBN: 978-1-57113-551-3
Verlag: CAMDEN HOUSE INC

Buch, Englisch, Band VOLU, 212 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 481 g

Reihe: Studies in German Literature L

Nelly Sachs (1891-1970) has long been regarded as one of the most significant Holocaust poets. Her conception of language and words as a landscape has been understood by scholars and critics as an exilic ersatz Heimat for the lost German homeland of a displaced poet. This reading, however, is based entirely on her postwar poems. Such an isolated approach to her complex body of work is increasingly historically problematic; it is also at odds with Sachs's generally cyclical poetic process.
In "The Space of Words," Jennifer Hoyer offers the first sustained critical analysis of Sachs's largely unanalyzed prewar poetry and prose, as well as the first analysis that examines structural and thematic ties between the prewar works and the Nobel Prize-winning postwar poetry. Through close readings of both Sachs's prewar and postwar works, Hoyer reveals a diasporic rather than exilic conception of the landscape of language, a position of constant wandering rather than static longing for return. This diasporic poetics promotes the intellectual and linguistic power of the wanderer and opens new insights into Sachs's essential significance as a Holocaust poet and a twentieth-century German-Jewish writer wary of the link of literary language to geopolitics and the narrative of nations.

Jennifer M. Hoyer is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Arkansas.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hoyer, Jennifer M.

Hoyle, Jennifer M.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Exilliteratur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturkritik: Hermeneutik und Interpretation
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literatursoziologie, Gender Studies
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Deutsche Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

"An Stelle von Heimat": An Introduction
Biography of the Poet: "a frail woman must do it"
Wandering and Words, Wandering in Words
Sach's Merlin the Sorcerer: Reconfiguring the Myth as Plural
Poetic Space after the Abyss
Israel Is Not Only Land: Diasporic Poetry
Relearning to Listen: Sachs's Poem Cycle "Dein Leib im Rauch durch die Luft"
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Jennifer Hoyer is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Arkansas.