OPUS documents https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/index/index/ Mon, 26 Jan 2026 08:08:02 +0100 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 08:08:02 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2657 Pastoral serves as a keyword when understanding Seamus Heaney’s literary production, both in terms of stylistic features and imagery. Although critical attention has focused on the connection between his pastoral works and contemporary Irish politics, the growth of ecocritical scholarship in the last few decades has made evident the importance of broadening such an analytical scope to relationships between humans and the environment while studying this genre. In this alignment, the present essay offers an ecocritical reading of some selected pastoral poems by Heaney, with a specific focus on his revival of the eclogue through the collection “Electric Light” (2001). Precisely, the poems “Virgil: Eclogue IX,” “Bann Valley Eclogue,” and “Glanmore Eclogue” will be read through the innovative perspective offered by the recent engagement of affect theory with ecocriticism: by doing so, I argue that Heaney’s poems can be understood as valuable nature narratives that stress the connectedness between the human and the nonhuman, while resonating with the urgencies posed by the current environmental crisis to re-think more ethical forms of relationships between them. Furthermore, through the lens of econarratology, attention will be paid to the ecological potentials expressed by the formal features of the eclogue: this observation considers, on the one hand, the notion of ‘relationality’ within the practice of the shepherds’ dialogue/singing and, on the other hand, how this literary form stresses the attachment between the human and the environment, both in the real world and in the storyworld. Hence, when exceeding a strictly politically oriented critical analysis of his work, Heaney’s eclogues become visible as compelling ecocritical accounts that favor investigating the role of (pastoral) literature in fostering critical discussions about human/nonhuman ethics as a way to respond to the challenges of the Anthropocene. Stefano Rozzoni article https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2657 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 08:08:02 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2655 Jürgen Ritte article https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2655 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 08:07:35 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2654 Friederike Reents article https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2654 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 08:07:00 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2653 Michael Braun article https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2653 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 08:06:24 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2652 Lorella Bosco article https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2652 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 08:05:54 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2651 Camilla Miglio article https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2651 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 08:05:26 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2650 Jan Söffner article https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2650 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 08:04:39 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2649 Am 22. und 23. Oktober 2019 fand an der Universität Bergamo ein “Convegno internazionale” über „Europäische Naturlyrik nach 1945“ mit Forscher:innen aus Italien und Deutschland statt. Bei freundlichem Herbstwetter wurden „Gespräche über Bäume“ unternommen, die von Brechts bekanntem Vers über Celans Naturlyrik bis zur Legitimation eines solchen „Gesprächs“ reichten. Der Horizont der Diskussion wurde komparatistisch ausgezogen und erstreckte sich auf die französische, die luxemburgische, die englische, die italienische und die deutsche Naturdichtung. Angesichts der Ideenfülle der Beiträge entschieden sich die Initiator:innen der Tagung dazu, die Beiträge auf zwei Bände zu verteilen: auf einen Themenband über Bäume in der zeitgenössischen Naturlyrik1 und den vorliegenden Band, in den die über das Baum-Motiv hinauswachsenden Beiträge der Tagung Eingang gefunden haben. Die Konferenz sowie die beiden daraus hervorgegangenen Bände sind ein Ergebnis der Zusammenarbeit von Amelia Valtolina (Bergamo) und Michael Braun (Berlin) mit der an der Universität Trier angesiedelten DFG-Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe 2603 „Russischsprachige Lyrik in Transition. Poetische Formen des Umgangs mit Grenzen der Gattung, Sprache, Kultur und Gesellschaft zwischen Europa, Asien und Amerika“. Die Vorträge dieser Konferenz nahmen das Wechselspiel von Geschichte und Natur im poetischen Wort, die Dialektik von Romantisierung und Dämonisierung der Natur sowie die Doppelfunktion von Modernekritik und Zivilisationsmüdigkeit im Naturgedicht in den Blick. Es ging um die Fort- oder Neuschreibung von Traditionen und Genres sowie um die Poetik und Ästhetik des Naturgedichts im kulturellen und historischen Wandel. Entsprechend rückt der Titel des vorliegenden Bandes das immer wieder in der Diskussion unter den Vortra genden hervorgehobene Transitorische des Naturbegriffes ins Zentrum. Michael Braun; Henrieke Stahl; Amelia Valtolina article https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2649 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 08:04:06 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2648 periodicalpart https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2648 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 08:03:35 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2647 Kirstin Zeyer article https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2647 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 08:02:50 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2646 Harald Schwaetzer article https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2646 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 08:02:21 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2645 Kazuhiko Yamaki article https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2645 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 08:01:43 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2644 Wolfgang Christian Schneider article https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2644 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 08:01:13 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2643 The concept of art is a lens through which one can explore the thought of Nicho las of Cusa. He uses this notion throughout his work in order to address the pro ductive dynamism of the divine mind as well as the human mind. With a focus on the human arts as likenesses of the divine art, this paper studies the relationship between the art of the word and the illiterate manual arts. Firstly, we examine the ars coniecturalis as a human art form that Cusanus presents for the first time in extenso in “De coniecturis”. Secondly, we address the power of the art of the word through the production of its most precious form, the spoken word. Thirdly, and finally, we inquire into the power of the manual arts through the example of the idiota’s making of wooden spoons in the “De mente” in order to show the relationship between this art and the art of the word. José González Ríos article https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2643 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 08:00:32 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2642 In the last chapter of “De coniecturis”, Cusanus exhorts his friend, Cardinal Giuli ano Cesarini, to get to know himself. This classical philosophical topic is revisited by Cusanus here in an original manner. On the one hand, Cusanus’ perspective reveals the strong influence of Proclus, which deserves to be highlighted. On the other, unlike Proclus, Cusanus asserts that self-knowledge is explicitly linked to the topic of the human being as created ad imaginem and that of the world as the sphere of contraction. Cusanus bases both subjective matters on the triune princi ple. According to him, the Divine Trinity is the exemplar that cannot be reached by an image, and the effort to reach the Trinity constitutes the basic requirement for the conjectural construction of the self. Furthermore, the fact that this under standing of the Trinity implies a distinction in itself makes the Trinity the princi ple of all difference or otherness in plurality. Cusanus concludes that the image can only be constructed relationally, that it is not possible to attain God without a fundamental knowledge of the self as an image, and that no one knows his own self without knowing others at the same time. Claudia D'Amico article https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2642 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 07:59:55 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2641 Gianluca Cuozzo article https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2641 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 07:59:29 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2640 Claudia D'Amico; Harald Schwaetzer article https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2640 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 07:59:00 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2639 periodicalpart https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2639 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 07:58:23 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2638 This paper explores the presence of the poetic word in contemporary urban settings: from “Poetry in Motion,” displayed in the New York City subway at the very place where one usually finds ads, to fluid xenon light projections of huge verse on the exterior of buildings in Basel or Zurich by visual artist Jenny Holzer, who presents poems of the Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska together with her own short “Truisms.” Or from single poems permanently written on walls – e.g. a much-discussed concrete poem by Eugen Gomringer at the facade of a Berlin college of education – to the technically enhanced spoken word, audible from far away as a side effect of gigantic poetry slam events in stadiums, e.g. the Trabrennbahn (race-course) in Hamburg and even performative events such as Ulrike Almut Sandig’s „augenpost“ in which poems are ‘published’ on posters, flyers and free postcards in the urban space of Leipzig or declaimed on public squares in Indian metropolises through a megaphone. Such presentations of poetry in urban space are still uncommon, thus creating an aesthetic experience that differs strongly from reception in private settings or even in readings or public poetry festivals, as the poem relates to its urban surroundings. Claudia Benthien article https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2638 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 07:56:56 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2636 This essay applies a Cultural Studies-approach to the multi-facetted relationship between poetry and advertisement as it emerged in the first half of the 20th century in the United States and as it became visible on billboards by the roadside. Somewhat paradoxically, public poetry in advertising appeared all across the United States (predominantly along highways in rural areas) around the time that much of modernist American poetry was being declared a highly elitist and urban centric affair in the orbit of new criticism-scholarship at universities. My first case study addresses the iconic Burma-Shave Billboard Poetry Campaign (1929-1963) and its long-lasting influence on American (popular) culture – in literature, music, visual art. Prior to this campaign as well as on the heels of it, billboards and billboard poetry were taken up to a minor extent in poetry circles and literary criticism (where they continued to be mostly viewed with disdain) and to a larger extent by conceptual artists who used billboard aesthetics, slogans, and short (poetic) texts in installations mimicking and critiquing consumer culture. One of the most aesthetically innovative recent ‘returns’ of billboard poetry, however, is the one employed intra-diegetically in the Hollywood film “Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri” (2017), my second case study. Here, the writing on the billboard-walls make those aspects explicit that have been submerged in the earlier rhymes by the roadside: While the playful, optimistic lines of advertisement imply, time and again, a happy white middle-class American family with a sober and well-shaved patriarch behind the wheel and thus gloss over the disavowed underside of mobility, the film makes the latent manifest and points to systemic / structural violence, such as a pervasive American rape ‘culture’ which is linked to the car and the mobility it offers. The film uses the billboard and its inscription as foil and as catalyst to address and to protest this and other forms of violence and thus presents an activist intervention in order to ask for more than merely poetic justice. Heike Paul article https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2636 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 07:56:27 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2634 In this article, I analyze the most recent Russian video poetry as an amplification and semantic enrichment of the classic literature paradigm. My thesis is that new visual poetry produces a subtle, polysemous – but at the same time striking – political message within a synthetic artistic framework. I show how recent Russian social (also to be called political) poetry is developing what I call the aesthetics of environmental non-division. I focus on the art collective “The Group of Esfir’ Shub,” which was founded in 2017 by the artist and designer Polina Zaslavskaia. The group’s synthetic method of working with poems generates a “tropic connection between the text and the video,” which correlates or even confronts direct and figurative sign meanings of different media with each other. “Esfir’ Shub” emphasizes one of the essential features of new social poetry ‒ the problematization of corporeality as a phenomenon belonging to organic, living material, which affects the very character of subjectivity. The project “Esfir’ Shub” is situated on the border between visual eco-art and social poetry. What is more important, it represents new trends in Russian engaged aesthetics, which I call biopoetics ‒ a notion which has been intensely discussed in the last two decades. Klavdia Smola article https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2634 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 07:55:51 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2633 Sonja Klimek article https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2633 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 07:55:09 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2632 Jacob Edmond article https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2632 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 07:54:37 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2631 In the article, I will discuss the relationship between ‘book poetry’ and ‘digital poetry.’ I examine the differences, as well as the similarities, between poetry as presented in these two media. Research on the transition from book poetry to digital poetry has mainly focussed on the significant changes in genre and work concepts as well as in the author and reader roles. However, several trends within the tradition of poetry have intensified and have further developed since the emergence of the digital media. The focus in this paper will thus be on four key features, which were founded in book poetry as far back as early Modernism and the avant-garde movements, but, to a great extent, those features have unfolded in digital poetry. The four features are the multimodality, the montage form, the network structure, and the serial form. The artistic opportunities offered by digital poetry are not only due to technological opportunities in the new media. Such opportunities are just as much due to the innovations in multimodality, montages, network structures, and seriality realized by avant-garde and symbolist poets like Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Schwitters, Eliot, and Pound in early modernism. My article concludes with an example of how the four features form the basis for a work of digital poetry, namely Johannes Heldén’s “The Primary Directive” (2008). Peter Stein Larsen article https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2631 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 07:54:04 +0100 https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2630 The article offers a preliminary investigation of the phenomenon of female-authored ‘poetry theater’ (shige juchang)1 in the People’s Republic of China. It discusses cross-genre explorations by a group of female poets, theater directors and artists who are all associated with the movement of ‘women’s poetry’ (nüxing shige) that emerged in the 1980s in China. The discussion focuses on two performances based on female-authored poems, “Riding a Roller Coaster Flying Toward the Future” (2011) and “Roaming the Fuchun Mountains with Huang Gongwang” (2016), which resulted from the joint efforts of four women: the poet Zhai Yongming, the poet-scholar Zhou Zan, and the theater directors Cao Kefei and Chen Si’an. Their avant-garde experiments with poetical theater document the different ways in which poetry is being translated into images, sounds, or bodily movements on stage. The paper argues that poetic exploration of writing and reciting practices has gained new momentum from emerging intermedial, visual-verbal experiments. Furthermore, it claims that interest in ‘poetry theater’ is also driven by the search for new forms of cross-genre stage performances that could be different from the previously politicized or commercialized ones. Justyna Jaguścik article https://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2630 Mon, 26 Jan 2026 07:53:27 +0100