Martin Nelly Sachs

The Poetics of Silence and the Limits of Representation
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-3-11-025673-4
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 207 Seiten

examines the poetry of the Nobel Prize-winning German Jewish poet Nelly Sachs. It firstly shifts established patterns of reception by analysing the author’s reception in East and West Germany after the war and the role she came to play in the Federal Republic as a representative ‘Poet of Reconciliation’. The study then situates Sachs’ work within the framework of the debate surrounding the representation of the Holocaust by means of a thorough exposition of the aporia at the heart of Theodor Adorno’s writings on post-Holocaust art. It demonstrates by close reading how Sachs’ work is itself marked by this aporetic struggle and exposes in particular the aesthetic means by which Sachs renders this aporetic tension legible in her poetry through her use of, for example, prosopopoeia, her recasting of traditional metaphors and her reversal of biblical archetypes. The primary question addressed is whether Sachs’ poetry, in spite of the fact that it thematises the impossibility of adequate representation, has representational value, or whether her work is bereft of concrete, representational meaning as a result of the often fragmented nature of her writing. In particular, the author confronts those critics who see in Sachs’ work elements of consolation, reconciliation, or redemption in a transcendental realm, in favour of a reading that regards her work as permeated with the concrete events of the Holocaust and irreconcilably opposed to any notion of a religious sense-making and redemptive paradigm.

Zielgruppe

Academics (Literary Studies, Cultural Studies), Institutes, Libraries

Autoren/Hrsg.

Martin, Elaine

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Deutsche Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Jüdische Studien Jüdische Studien Jüdische Studien: Literatur & Kunst
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Rezeption, literarische Einflüsse und Beziehungen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1;Acknowledgements;6
2;Contents;8
3;Introduction;10
4;I Contexts;16
4.1;1 Nelly Sachs: A Tumultuous Reception History;18
4.1.1;1.1 West Germany’s Three Myths;18
4.1.2;1.2 Peace with The Perpetrators;27
4.1.3;1.3 Restoration in the Literary Arena;33
4.1.4;1.4 Reception in the East;36
4.1.5;1.5 Reception in the West: “Die Dichterin der Versöhnung”;42
4.2;2 The Problematics of Holocaust Representation;58
4.2.1;2.1 Adorno’s ‘after-Auschwitz’ Aporia;58
4.2.2;2.2 The Expropriation of Death and Adorno’s Modernist Critique;64
4.2.3;2.3 ‘The Extremity that Eludes the Concept’;66
4.2.4;2.4 The Failure of Culture;70
4.2.5;2.5 Adorno’s ‘Widerruf’;72
5;II Practices;76
5.1;3 Nelly Sachs’ Poetics of Silence: Poetry at the Limits of Representation;78
5.1.1;3.1 Defying ‘Verstummen’;78
5.1.2;3.2 The Decay of Language;80
5.1.3;3.3 Addressing the Perpetrators;92
5.1.4;3.4 Prosopopoeia as a Representational Device;107
5.1.5;3.5 Sachs’ Nacht-Metaphorik: Reversing a Traditional Image;114
5.1.6;3.6 The Poetics of Disfiguration;122
5.1.7;3.7 Adorno’s Extremity in Sachs’ Poetics;131
5.1.8;3.8 Writing the Inability to Write: Sachs’ Self-Reflective Poetics;134
5.1.9;3.9 ‘Grabschriften in die Luft’: Keeping Memory Open;140
5.1.9.1;3.9.1 The Open Wound;146
5.1.10;3.10 The ‘Death of Death’: ‘Die Todentrissenen’;149
5.1.11;3.11 Archetypes as Representational Devices;159
5.1.11.1;3.11.1 Sachs’ ‘Anti-Job’;161
5.1.11.2;3.11.2 Abraham: Refuting the Martyrdom Thesis;176
5.1.11.3;3.11.3 Daniel: Interpreter of Nightmares;188
6;Conclusion;192
7;Bibliography;196

Über Autor(innen)

Martin, Elaine
Elaine Martin, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Ireland.