This article investigates selected texts and oral performances by two contemporary authors, Nico Bleutge and Mette Moestrup, who adapt or rewrite Christensen’s poems. In the works focused on (Moestrups poems “My Language” and “Hvad betyder det for sommerfuglen”, Bleutge’s speech “Den Wiederholungen folgen” and the poem “fischhaare finden”), translation plays a central role, and animals (especially winged ones) become a motor for transformational movements between languages and authors. Unsettling the semantic and structural level of language, the named birds and butterflies set loose acoustic dynamics that lead us back to Christensen’s reflections on mortality, contingency, and poetics in her essays.

This essay discusses the relationship between Inger Christensen’s work and contemporary Danish eco-literature. Christensen can seem like a towering predecessor. Yet, the relationship is more complex than a question of anxiety of influence. This essay argues that Christensen and contemporary Danish literature exhibit differing ecological imaginaries, and that this becomes clear when one examines Christensen’s utopian writing, her heliocentric utopianism, of the late seventies and early eighties, and when one examines how ecological threats are depicted in her work. For Christensen, the paradigmatic threat to the world is the nuclear bomb and its excessive use of energy, for today’s literature it is the feedback loops of pollution, exemplified in the threat of climate change.

This article discusses the high regard for Danish poet Inger Christensen in Germany and her connection to the Künstlerhaus [Artists’ Residence] in Edenkoben, located in Rhineland-Palatinate. The Künstlerhaus serves as a cultural institution where international artists from various fields can reside and collaborate. Inger Christensen had strong connections with the Künstlerhaus Edenkoben and participated in its German-Danish poetry project. During her visits to Edenkoben, she wrote several poems. In an essay, the poet described Edenkoben’s landscape as paradise-like. This article, on the one hand, examines these texts in the context of Inger Christensen’s stay in Edenkoben. On the other, it sheds light on “Weg der Gedichte”, a project that stages Inger Christensen’s poem “Erinnerung an Edenkoben” in a public space around the Künstlerhaus, showcasing the role of poetry in rural settings and its ability to enhance the experience of nature and hiking.

Inger Christensen muss vielleicht als die bedeutendste dänische Dichterin der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts gelten, die auch im deutschsprachigen Raum große Beachtung fand. Ihr Einfluss auf die gegenwärtige deutschsprachige und skandinavische Lyrik wird in diesem Band erstmalig untersucht. Die hier versammelten Beiträge folgen den Spuren Inger Christensens in den lyrischen und essayistischen Arbeiten von Thomas Kling, Nico Bleutge, Herta Müller, Oswald Egger, Pia Tafdrup, Mette Moestrup, Silke Scheuermann, Jan Wagner, Uljana Wolf, Amalie Smith, Birgitta Trotzig und anderen. Dabei widmen sich die Studien sowohl Christensens sprachtheoretischen Reflexionen und den formalen Einflüssen ihres Werks und deren Transformationen in der Gegenwartslyrik als auch den thematischen Gegenständen ihrer Dichtung, insbesondere ihrem Naturkonzept und dessen Adaption in neueren ökokritischen Ansätzen.

This article defines the ‘zero text’ as a text that is completely absent(ed) and is replaced by its own paratext. Such a text is a pure statement, the content of which is constituted by its context, presentation, and authorship (or performance), as well as the form of the ‘zero text’ itself. The political potential of the ‘zero text’ under an authoritarian regime becomes apparent, for instance, in the famous joke about Rabinovich handing out blank pamphlets in Red Square, but it can also be seen in the literalization of folkloric motifs in a number of protest demonstrations in post-Soviet Russia. The origin of these demonstrations can be traced to ‘zero texts’ used in the poetic avant-garde (“Poem of the End” by Vasilisk Gnedov, for example) and in neo- or post-avant-garde practices from the second half of the 20th century – in particular, those associated with names like Alexander Kondratov and Dmitriy A. Prigov, whose work actualized the political semantics of the ‘missing text.’

Shortly after Ukraine had declared its independence in December 1991, Joseph Brodsky, Nobel Prize Winner in Literature 1987, wrote the poem «На независимость Украины» [On the Independence of Ukraine], which sarcastically mourns the separation of Russia and Ukraine. In 2015, responding to the armed conflict in Ukraine, teacher and poet Aleksandr Byvshev issued a reply to this poem under the same title, taking the side of Ukraine. Both poems have been perceived as aggressive, insulting, and anti-Ukrainian or anti-Russian, respectively. This paper asks the question of whether – and in what sense – the two poems are aggressive by drawing on the linguistic features of the two texts. The investigation of the linguistic characteristics of the poems is supplemented by an analysis inspired by argumentation theory, since, as will be shown, both texts are essentially argumentative.

Using the texts of the poet and literary scholar Przemysław Dakowicz as an example, this article analyzes how the traditional martyrological discourse of the ‘romantic paradigm’ (Maria Janion) is revived in contemporary Polish poetry. The aesthetic and political instrumentalization of the symbolic link between the mass execution of Katyń in 1940 and the air crash of Smolensk in 2010 is of particular importance in this context, and, in approaching these subjects, I will suggest reading Dakowicz’s obsessive interest in the physical remains of the dead as a poetic implementation of the forensic turn that has critically manifested itself in recent years in the research of mass violence and crimes of genocide. In my discussion of the historical-political and poetic implications of this turn, I argue that Dakowicz performs a shift from the perspective of the witness to an event to that of the witness to the exhumation of physical remains and that this is how his professional background as a literary scholar comes into play. In dealing with the remnants of dead bodies, Dakowicz engages competing strategies of archiving (sighting, sifting, and safekeeping) on the one hand and hermeneutics (interpretation, revitalization) on the other. The works of the Polish historian Ewa Domańska serve as further theoretical background to this discussion (“Nekros: Introduction to the Ontology of the Dead Body,“ 2017, in Polish).

This study will examine two different types of poetry that can be broadly classified as “political” in an attempt to reach an understanding of the interaction between politics and poetry in modern Japan. The first sampling of poetry will be taken from the Internet and will be amateur verse belonging to such traditional genres of poetry as haiku / senryū and tanka that can be classified as agitprop poetry. The second more substantive sampling will be taken from “professional” poets and will mainly fall into the shi (free verse) category. I will also discuss various literary critics and also thinkers on aesthetics from both Japan and the West to further elucidate the relationship between poetry and politics, to elaborate a broad definition of the political domain appropriate to Japanese verse, and also to investigate the issue of how to read and evaluate poetry as literary art. The study will be divided into five parts: first, the introduction outlining and probing the issues under discussion, next, an examination of Japanese agitprop poetry drawn from the Internet, then a brief interregnum on (literary) theory focusing on two theoreticians, Yoshimoto Takaaki (1924–2012) from Japan and Jonathan Culler (b. 1944) from the West, followed by an investigation of contemporary free verse political poetry, specifically the verse of Minashita Kiryū (b. 1970), Misumi Mizuki (b. 1981), Yotsumoto Yasuhiro (b. 1959), and Arai Takako (b. 1996).

This article considers the theme of Karl Marx in the poetry and artwork of Dmitrii Prigov. It conceives of his poetic communication as a political activity, which is stressed by its performative qualities and is presented by the example of the poem “Moscow and Muscovites”. Further on, the article distinguishes four speech attitudes in relation to the term “Karl Max” in the culture of Soviet Russia: belief, condemnation, quotation, and Prigov’s technique of reading Marx’s texts literally. Thus, he interprets Marx’s sentence “The answer to a question is contained in the critique of the question itself” verbatim and, by generalization (a common device of Soviet Marxism), leads it to absurdity. Prigov does the same with the slogan “Proletarians of the World Unite” from the “Communist Manifesto”, which he transforms into a parodic epistolary poem modeled on Lermontov’s “Demon”. The article also considers the use of the name of Marx and the stereotypically connected family names of Engels, Lenin, and Stalin in Prigov’s work and argues, using the motif of the policemen (“militsaner”), that, contrary to Marx’s expectations of real Socialism, the function of power was not dying but growing. Finally, attention is drawn to the role of so-called historical and socio-economical “Marxist laws” (such as ‘dialectical’ and ‘historical materialism’), which in Prigov’s work are dethroned and become possible concepts beside others. Thus, Prigov installs freedom in place of the Marxist necessity of interpretation, which was also the basis of Mikhail Lifshitz’s anti-modernist aesthetics, the most important contribution of Soviet philosophy to aesthetic theory.

Despite the compulsory exegeses of Marx conducted at universities in the GDR, which most poets completed, the work of the young Marx exerted a genuine creative fascination upon many of them, varying by gravity and intensity depending on the historical period. Bertolt Brecht, Hans Mayer, and Robert Havemann acted as mediators of Marx for the poets who emerged to dominate the lyric poetry of the GDR since the mid-1960s (Sarah Kirsch, Karl Mickel, Volker Braun, among others). Ernst Bloch’s most important work, „Das Prinzip Hoffnung“ (“The Principle of Hope”), which revolves around the utopian core idea of “the reconciliation of man and nature,” harkens back to the writings of the young Marx and can be regarded as central to the latter’s reception at the time. This is particularly evident in poems by Volker Braun and Karl Mickel, which will be considered here in more detail. Since the 1970s, however, socialist critique in poetry has increasingly been overlaid by a critique of civilization. This refocusing on the ‘globalist Marx,’ which had already been prepared by Karl Mickel’s poem „Der See“ (“The Lake”) (1963), has resulted in both the intensified resumption of Marxian / Blochian emblematics (Volker Braun) and a decided departure from any “principle of hope” (Günter Kunert). With postmodernism and the Wendezeit, lyrical insistence upon Marx seemed to have become obsolete. Yet along with the renaissance of nature poetry since the turn of the 21st century, Marx’s thinking – and particularly, the tradition of ‘Young Marx’ – has reemerged with new relevance to the “poetry of now” generation (Daniel Falb and others), who react critically to anthropogenic influence upon the climate and biosphere. In this context, the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’ occupies a key position in contemporary poetological reflection as well as in the practice of writing.

Politische Themen und Intentionen in der Lyrik der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts und zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts bilden den Gegenstand dieses Bandes. Das Spektrum der Beiträge reicht von länderspezifischen Analysen der Formen und Funktionen politischer Lyrik über die poetische Auseinandersetzung mit innen- wie außenpolitischen Problemen und Konflikten bis hin zu Lyrik als politischer Aktion. Der Akzent liegt auf slavischen und ostasiatischen Sprachen sowie auf der deutschsprachigen Lyrik.

This case study addresses the question of families, both referential and literary, in the 2017 mystery novel «Qui a Tué Heidi?» (“Who Killed Heidi?”), by Swiss writer Marc Voltenauer. It sets out with the assumption that the family, despite the changes undergone, is still perceived as “the uncanny” and fascinates French-speaking authors, including those whose main stake is not its depiction. According to the initial hypothesis, Marc Voltenauer puts family matters at the service of his literary project. Several family stories are woven into the police investigation, which is typical for mystery novels and forms the core of the narrative canvas. These literary families, laden with secrets, dysfunctional and potentially pathogenic, are depicted in a hyperbolic way. Is this just a consequence of genre norms (the detective novel is based on a set of stereotypes) or does the author paint a troubling picture of the contemporary family and its metamorphoses? This is one of the questions the study attempts to answer.

In «Tu écriras mon nom sur les eaux», published in 2019, Jean-François Haas proposes a reflection on the family based on two distinct models put in opposition. The first, limited and exclusive, corresponds to the archetype of the Swiss family at the beginning of the 20th century. Haas describes it extensively in the first part of his novel before breaking it up and proposing a more open and human counter-model based on fiction and the potentialities offered by literature. Playing on in-tertextuality and the use of personal pronouns, among other things, Haas lays the foundations of an ideal but illusory family model, encompassing humanity in its entirety. By constantly weaving links between different moments of the 20th cen-tury and the present of narration and writing, Jean-François Haas is also building a strong discourse on Switzerland, its institutions and conservatism.

The contribution is based on the hypothesis that Charles Lewinsky’s novel “Melnitz” should be read as the first literary cultural and social history of Swiss Jews after legal emancipation. On the one hand, it highlights the magical realist figure of Uncle Melnitz, a revenant eyewitness whose existence can be traced back to the violent persecution of Jews during the Cossack Khmelnytskyi Uprising in the 17th century, and who, following the pattern of Benjamin’s Angelus Novus, repeatedly comments on events from the perspective of the Jewish persecutees. Through Melnitz’s commentaries, the generational history of the Meijer family is presented simultaneously as Swiss history and as a collective Jewish history of memory. The identity of the Jews in Switzerland, which is perceived stereotypically as homogeneous from the outside, is in this way continuously renegotiated in the novel between adaptation and self-assurance, such that the demarcation between Jewish and non-Jewish cultures becomes increasingly blurred.

This article deals with a selection of contemporary texts by Swiss authors that address the theme of the family in various ways. The question put forward is whether such literary representations still represent today’s families or whether they miss the mark. The variety of literary forms and the spectrum of perspectives in this selection proved far more diverse than expected. Nevertheless, auto-fictional narration is still fundamental, whereby retrospectives of a life lived are conveyed from within the narrator’s own family circle. The discourse of memory continues to dominate substantial parts of the narrative, and a preoccupation with father-son and mother-daughter relations within family constellations still remains relevant. However, humour and irony are also important as a means of creating distance at moments where reality verges on the absurd and the narrator’s own family is shown in a comic light, or where the terrain is delicate, as for example when the action takes place in a nursing home.

This article outlines the development towards the codification of civil law, the most important cornerstones of the original Swiss “Civil Code” of 1912, as well as important developments in family law, and discusses their societal context. It will become apparent that legislation in family law over the past decades has been primarily characterised by efforts to achieve equality. From the 1970s onwards, legislative revisions were made in an attempt to follow the social developments. Adoption and child law were revised first, followed by marital and divorce law. While these mentioned legal bases were revised in partial steps in the 20th century, same-sex couples did not receive legal regulation of their partnership until the beginning of the 21st century. Whether the non-marital partnership should have their own legal regulation is currently left open by the legislature. In December 2020, however, the doors of the Civil Code opened for same-sex couples. Marriage for all was approved by the people in the vote of 26 September 2021. Nevertheless, this is not the end of the legislative revisions. In the near future, the discussion on equal rights will focus on a new regulation of the law of descent.

As this introduction and the following contributions will show, family in its many forms continues to be an essential element of social life as well as of literary plots. With regard to Swiss literature, the family in its diversity intersects with a multilingual corpus, opening up a new view of the relationship between social preconditions and literary reflection.

This article discusses the theatrical form named in German Trauerspiel (the baroque drama or mourning play), focusing on the constitutive elements of its concept – both play and mourning. Although it has often been compared or reduced to ‘tragedy,’ in a sort of excessive anticipation of Romantic theatrical forms, Trauerspiel is more likely to express the traumas of secularization in the early modern age, as both noble and humble subjects face religious and political turmoil. Taking inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s renowned thesis in the book „Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels“ (1925), the article investigates some crucial actual elements of baroque drama-writing such as sovereignty, guilt, empathy, and the search for further intersections with the theories of playwriting proposed in 1938 by Johan Huizinga and discussed a few years later by French critic and thinker Georges Bataille.

Walter Benjamin’s formulation about epic theater is well-known: Brecht succeeds in turning the theater from a “Bannraum” sort of spell room, into a “conveniently located exhibition space.” The epic playwright draws on “the great old opportunity of the theater in a new way – on the exposure of what is present.” Whether consciously quoting Benjamin or not, the words “exhibition” and “exposure” are often used by theater makers and scholars to reinforce the seriousness either of the act of showing or of the shown object. If something is being exhibited and not simply represented, the stress lies on the attempt to have an effect: to have consequences beyond the aesthetical as-if-frame. “Exhibition” and “exposure” seem first to recur with a precise and alternative sense in Benjamin, in Brecht and in the Russian avantgarde regisseur and author S. Tretiakov, who became a friend of Brecht in the 1920s. What they understand by “exhibition” seems to be something very specific, not a mere metaphor, rather an operational term. Benjamin uses it in various texts and different formulas (as, for example, the famous and enigmatic „Ausstellungswert“, or “exposition-value”, combined with “cult-value”, in a kind of historical dialectic of the work of art). But the concept of aura and its agony generally steal the show, while the concepts of „Ausstellen“ and „Ausstellungswert“ are often misunderstood according to our current idea of “exposition” from the context of museums, galleries and exhibitions, and according to our experience of “absolute visibility” as a paradigm of modern life (Agamben 2005). This easy to misunderstand, difficult to grasp “exposition-value” seems to name a different experience and an innovative chance that resides in modern reproducibility. Its difference could be not only relevant for theater and its history as an art form, but also for theater intended as a dimension and opportunity of social practice.

Being a spectator in the theater has not always meant watching a performance while sitting quietly in the dark. There was a time when theaters were fully lit and very noisy. A whole range of legislative, administrative, architectural, and aesthetic reforms as well as state ordinances were needed to tame this quarrelsome and undisciplined mass and to transform it into a contemplative and empathic audience that became a function of the imagination. There is a close connection between the development of a theater that had become an agent of government and the emergence of increasingly effective mechanisms of theatrical illusion. Governmentality generates a new aesthetic that aims to steer the audience in certain directions, to determine and to control it. It goes without saying that theater, especially modern theater, has had a decisive effect in this direction. Theater was and is both an agent of governmentality and its critique. Now, this critique has manifested itself and continues to manifest itself in projects aimed at emancipating the public from any kind of governmentality via the stage itself. Yet the stage remains an agent of governmentality even as it seeks to evade this function. This is a paradox that is perhaps constitutive and necessary to theater. The question now is whether this paradox can be resolved and whether an autonomous emancipation of the audience—one that is not governed by the stage—can be imagined, and, if so, in what forms. Put otherwise, it is a question of whether the spectator “without someone else’s guidance” can alienate himself from this position and become a self-determined subject.

Concepts are by no means merely illustrations from which to adequately describe a state of affairs but are rather tools by means of which we orient ourselves habitually and more or less effectively in our reality. This does not only apply to theoretical thinking: whether in everyday life or in the practice of art, one does not so easily escape concepts either. An indispensable artistic-critical moment consists in overcoming a concept’s periodic “loss of traction” by making it functional again. The articles in this issue work in this direction: in dealing with the changing reality of theater, they further develop its established concepts or explore the critical potential of relatively new concepts that also extend beyond it. Overall, they document the attempt not only to think about theater, but also to think with the help of theater.

When we feel that all beings are interconnected – how can we reconstruct this in philosophical terms, avoiding ideology and scientific-evolutionary or religious big pictures? This text looks at Bergsons notion of intuition and Rentschs notion of negativity and the transcendental conditions of life in order to describe a secular mysticism. Love is a core aspect of this mysticism since love protects singularity (Rentsch), sees potentials of development (Scheler) and can connect us with the world (Bergson).

In his work “On the Origin of Natural Philosophy from the Spirit of Mysticism” Karl Joël refers several times to Schelling and his thinking about nature without elaborating on this references. The article discusses the thesis, whether the concept of conversion, which seems to be essential for Joëls philosophical approach, could be seen as a link between him and Schelling. It substantiates that both authors find in the conversion of human beings a condition for a non-reductive insight into nature.

According to Joël’s study from 1906, natural philosophy, religious feeling or thinking and poetry are not separate cultural phenomena, but rather are interrelated. This contradicts the prevailing view around 1900 and so his work can be understood as an attempt to develop a new view of cultural horizons. Joël sees “feeling” and “mysticism” directed at nature as the main impulse. These two terms, which were completely shaped by the psychological ideas around 1900, cannot, however, come close to the life of early antiquity and obstruct the view of the novelty seen by Joël: the determination of a special cognitive disposition of a time that permeates all cultural phenomena.

The volume is devoted to the approach of the philosopher Karl Joël, which he presented under the title “Der Ursprung der Naturphilosophie aus dem Geiste derMystik” in 1906. Although the times have changed, it is worth pointing out the sources from which Joël drew, according to the conviction that gave rise to the present volume. Just as he himself asks about the origin of the philosophy of nature, so the contributions to this volume will enquire about the origin of his own thought. After a presentation of Joël’s concept (Schwaetzer), the three epochs to which he primarily recurs will be considered: Antiquity (Schneider), the Renaissance (Cuozzo) and German Idealism (Hueck), including Late Idealism (Hernández). Finally, there is a view from the present (Thomas). In a narrower sense, the question of the present volume is situated in the area of a philosophy of nature of the Anthropocene. It discusses the thesis that the philosophy of nature arises from mysticism without being dissolved in it, but that the former must not deny its origin Joël thus offers a concept of science that productively questions current understandings and is at the same time embedded in an anthropology that also takes seriously the mental and spiritual in man and the cosmos.

On 27 June 2020, the prominent feminist poet Galina Rymbu published the poem «Моя вагина» (“My Vagina”) on her Facebook feed. «Моя вагина» is a solidarity poem, written in support of artist and LGBTQ activist Iuliia Tsvetkova, who is facing a charge of distributing pornography for her abstract paintings of vaginas in a group on the social media platform VKontakte. Rymbu’s poem created huge resonance: it was shared, translated and republished on various platforms on the web and in print, examined by researchers, and debated as both a work of literature and a political statement. The present article charts the story of this remarkable poem, from its origins to its formal properties, its place within contemporary feminist poetry and its close links to feminist activism, and the reactions it has triggered. It also analyses the follow-up poem Rymbu wrote in reply to her detractors, «Великая русская литература» (“Great Russian Literature”), with a focus on Rymbu’s ingenious play on personal pronouns. Finally, it will briefly look at the role of social media for the literary process in Russia, specifically the field of poetry.

This article investigates the poetry and public life of Alina A. Vitukhnovskaia against the backdrop of her position as a political dissident in Russia. In opposition to most contemporary Russian poets, she considers her writing to be actively “political,” that is directly interfering with governmental politics. The first part of the article introduces methodological concepts in order to consider the relation between Vitukhnovskaia’s poetry and her political activity: distinguishing between the poetic subject, the media-persona (the presentation of the author and the person Alina Vitukhnovskaia to the public), and the political habitus. The subsequent sections investigate her poetic work, her public appearance, and her political activities in relation to these concepts. Vitukhnovskaia’s poetic subject appears to be characterized by provocation with regard to both aesthetic forms and social themes. Formal provocation is carried out by means of disturbing paronomasia, whereas social and thematic provocation involves the negation of traditional, often nationalist, attitudes and the presentation of negative ideological or philosophical terms (nothingness, emptiness, ugliness, evil). While the former has a philosophical appeal (existentialism), the latter is related to the tradition of the demoniacal, such as goth subculture and necro-aesthetics. Vitukhnovskaia turns surrealism upside-down: making artistic ‘reality’ seem less surreal than the reality of the world. The construction of the poetic subject with provocative elements helps Vitukhnovskaia establish a media-persona. This is considered with regard to self-portraits in the book “The Black Icon of Russian Literature” (2017). The combination of aesthetic (beauty), sexuality (domina), and power is interpreted as a provocative dimension of this media-persona. The last part analyzes the political program of Vitukhnovskaia’s application for the 2018 presidential elections as a collection of demands that contain provocative challenges: for instance, the armament of Russian citizens and nuclear disarmament of the state. This incongruity of political demands is a provocation that correlates with an aspiration to unlimited power. Provocation is also considered the main feature of Vitukhnovskaja’s political practice, which she subordinates to the presentation of her media-persona.

In contemporary poetry, transgressive writing – understood as a specific type of social action and discourse that generates new meanings – includes diverse and complex poetic practices and relations between the body and politics, the private and the political. This article focuses on a small selection of texts by German- and Russian-speaking female poets that demonstrate different ways of poetically rethinking the body, its borders, and its connection to the political. Included are poems by Barbara Köhler, Gabriele Kachold-Stötzer, Ann Cotten, Lidia Yusupova, Oksana Vasyakina, Galina Rymbu, and Nika Skandiaka.

Since the mid-2010s, the problem of overcoming individualism and social atomization through group solidarity has been a central motif of Russian political poetry. New responses to this issue primarily employ feminist optics and an intersectional approach: at the crossroads of gender, nation, and society, authors as diverse as Galina Rymbu, Oksana Vasyakina, Elena Fanaylova, and Maria Galina all explore possibilities for linking the poetic subject to the construction of a group consciousness or collective. I propose that a hallmark of this tendency is the increased frequency and ingratiating use of first-person plural pronouns. This “we index” (the ratio of the number of these pronouns to the number of lines in a text) seems to demonstrate a direct correlation to the author’s degree of thematic interest in the problem; meanwhile, the example of Ilya Rissenberg also shows how the solidarity motif functions in political poetry with a low “we index.”

In contemporary Russian poetry, a special movement has emerged that engages in political activism under the feminist banner. This form of political poetry aims less at criticism and subversion than at making a direct social impact. Poems are written as per-formative forms of social action and often with a concrete purpose. They aim to resist power and take the side of the oppressed. The poetic subject opens her voice and her body in solidarity with others or courageously opposes the establishment through provocation — even aggression.

On the “Flowing Movement” and the “Lofty and Ancient” in Gary Snyder’s Poetry Gary Snyder, a renowned 20th century American poet, has been strongly influenced by Eastern cultures, especially Chinese. The philosophical spirit of Eastern culture and its intuitive way of thinking have taken root in Snyder’s mind and directly shaped his perception of nature. Hence, in view of the inadequacy of Western literary criticism in interpreting the Eastern dimensions of Snyder’s poetry, this article takes the classical Chinese literary theory “Twenty-Four Styles of Poetry” as its theoretical perspective and uses its categories of “Flowing Movement” and “Lofty and Ancient” to explore how the dissolved or solitary poetic self achieves the mental state of “emptiness” (kong in Chinese Taoism and sunyata in the Buddhist sense) and creates the poetic worlds of the “flowing movement” and the “lofty and ancient” (transcendence) in Snyder’s poems.

Francis Ponge’s work represents a highly reflective concept of writing. His attempt to come close to nature is determined by the conviction that this approach has to be taken by an almost monastic respect for the phenomena and has to eschew abstract notions and generalizations. His project of writing is a deeply moral one; it pursues a type of representation that involves the subject and does not conceive the world he approaches by writing as an object. In order to grasp the essence of this author’s work, Jacques Derrida’s monograph “Signéponge” is adduced, which is the most enlightening contribution on Ponge to have ever been made. Furthermore, it will be shown that Ponge’s work relates to issues that are central to the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin and the language theory of Walter Benjamin.

This article aims to reconstruct the reception of pre-Socratic philosophy, especially that of Parmenides, in Russian modernism and avant-garde literature. In doing so, it places this reception into two contexts: the contemporary discussion of pre-Socratic ideas in Russian, European and American philosophy, on the one hand, and the proclamation of a third, a Russian and/or Slavic Renaissance, on the other. This Renaissance has been conceived as the intense discussion and reconsideration of ideas, notions, and expressions of ancient Greek thinking. It aimed also to avoid the reduction of Greek philosophy to Plato, as had been practiced by the Russian Orthodox Church and largely pushed through in Russian culture. One of the main points of this reconsideration concerned the quest of the relation between the word, the process of thinking, and human life, while another one connected with it involved the (re-)establishment of a close bond between the poetic word, its meaning, and its sense. The integration of this productive discussion with pre-Socratic Greek philosophy enriches and improves our knowledge of Russian modernism and avant- garde literature.

The claim that a thinker concerned with the development of a totalizing metaphysical system can be a literary philosopher may seem hard to justify. For Arthur Schopenhauer, the entire world is the representation or appearance of the will to life, the metaphysical essence of all being. And yet, because this will must always appear and always take form, it is only formally that we can grasp it, only in concrete instances. For this reason, the poet “shows us how the will behaves under the influence of motives and reflection. He presents us this for the most part in the most perfect of its appearances” (WWRII, 310). In this paper, I will argue that Schopenhauer founds a philosophical approach which comes to rest on literary foundations and which alights at key moments on the strength of his literary as well as his philosophical forebears. I will do this by means of looking at how Schopenhauer treats the concept of fate. It is my contention that the fatalism inherent in Schopenhauer’s ethics is a direct result of a fundamentally literary approach to the concept. This enables us to conceive of fate from a literary and not solely from a metaphysical standpoint. I will begin by outlining the place of the literary in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, including a brief account of those writers whose work he incorporates into his analysis, and then I will demonstrate its relation to his fatalism.

In Hegel’s “Lectures on Aesthetics”, poetry bears special relevance to the thesis of the spiritualization of art, the way of the medium from stone to word. The theoretical basis for this thesis rests on Hegel’s epistemic concept of intuition (Anschauung), representation (Vorstellung), and concept (Begriff ), as well as the components developed in this context for a modern semiology – a philosophical theory of signs and language. Poetry is considered as the most general, most comprehensive, and most spiritual art. A new kind of self-relation is constituted: imagination is related to imagination, representation to representation. Hegel unfolds a gradation from intuitive and imagining self-understanding – from art and religion – towards self-relational thought, a conceptual cognition of philosophy with its basis in the self-thinking thought (das Denken des Denkens). An intermingling of the forms of poetic and philosophical expression is to be avoided; crucial is a clean distinction between the forms of presentation proper to literature and to philosophy respectively, between the “army of metaphors” and the “phalanx of concepts” (Begriffe).

A diachronic approach to the relationship between literature and philosophy since antiquity needs to include the field of rhetoric, regardless of whether it appears as a link or a disruption. This article discusses fundamental questions of rhetoric, philosophy, and poetics in the example of invisible characters and their moral qualities in antiquity and the mid-18th century. Plato’s mythical literary version of the Gyges legend in the “Republic” conceives of the invisible character as an illustration of the morally depraved nature of humans. In the following, I shall not trace this “Gyges problem” in the terms of influence studies but rather with an awareness of the ubiquity of ancient knowledge in philosophy and literature of the 18th century. I shall situate Adam Smith’s oft-discussed metaphor of the invisible hand in the context of his lectures on rhetoric, which were instrumental in founding the tradition of the Scottish New Rhetoric. I shall argue that invisibility forms a central element of Smith’s definition of character. The manifold implications of such a conception of invisible characters will then be illustrated using the example of Eliza Haywood’s “The Invisible Spy” (1755) and her conception of authorial ethos. Thus, the metaphor of invisibility proves itself to be of transhistorical relevance for the relationship between philosophy and literature, especially when they both turn to character – understood as fictional person, moral constitution, and the medium of the letter.

This paper takes up the topic explored by Wolfgang G. Müller in this volume and discusses the various forms in which Carneades’ thought experiment was conceptualized and employed in philosophy, science, and law, as well as literature and film of the 20th and 21st centuries. Of course, it will not be possible to address all instances – in particular in popular culture, where the dilemma raised by Carneades resurfaces in ever new metaphorizations – and I will have to focus on some theoretical aspects, a few practical cases, and a variety of patterns and motifs that emerge in literary works or films. In some variants, the elements of the thought experiment have changed to a certain degree, but the underlying dilemma is still clearly recognizable. Of particular importance in recent discussions is the so-called trolley problem and research into cognitive responses to the dilemma. A second approach can be found in evolutionary theory and the discussion of altruism and self-sacrifice, both of which do not seem to be compatible with the struggle for survival as described in Darwinism. In the realm of law, the case of Mary and Jodie Attard forced a court decision on whether a human being should be killed in order to save the life of the conjoined sibling: similarly, but on a different scale, controversial discussions following the aftermath of 9/11 have involved the question as to whether a plane with possibly hundreds of passengers should be shot down to prevent an even larger catastrophe. Each of these theoretical concepts and their very real considerations have had their impact on literature and cinema, and this paper offers a survey of the most important narrative patterns and examples.

This essay attempts to establish an ethics of literature, which, as distinct from earlier approaches, is transgenerically oriented in that it does not focus on narrative alone but on the three main literary genres of narrative, dramatic, and lyric art. It follows Wittgenstein’s much-quoted dictum that aesthetics and ethics are one. Its basic assumption is that ethics emerges in literature under the condition of aesthetic form. The much-discussed problem of the relation between philosophy and literature is found in the concept of the proposition, which, in Aristotle, who uses the term apophansis, means a statement, assertion, or predication. In philosophy, the proposition is, as Gottfried Gabriel emphasizes in his monograph on cognition (2015), an essential element within deductive processes of argumentation, contributing to proving a theoretical position or working out a theoretical position. In literature, propositions usually do not occur in extended argumentative contexts. They make a statement that may have a significant philosophical and specifically ethical impact and that may relate to the entire works concerned. Hence, the concept of propositionality makes it possible to relate and simultaneously differentiate the two great achievements of the human mind: philosophy and literature. In the essay’s analytic part attention is given to specific ethical dilemmas in Homer’s “Iliad” and Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, the representation of evil in Shakespeare’s tragedies, narrative strategies for presenting ethical situations and events in nineteenth-century novels (Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Twain, Tolstoy), and the occurrence of ethical elements in lyric poetry. As far as the lyric genre is concerned, we take note of the paradoxical fact that even in the object poetry of Rilke and the imagists (Williams), an ethical aspect emerges. A common result of textual analysis is the recognition of propositional elements in all texts investigated.

It is Aristotle to whom we owe the first philosophical theory of poetic art fully extant from antiquity. He recognized the origin of art and poetry in man’s capacity for theory and his pleasure in it, for he considered imitation (mímēsis) as the beginning and basis of cognition. He understood imitation not as a mere act of copying but as the realization and re-implementation of a single person’s general disposition to act, which is to say his or her disposition to turn towards the world aiming to seek pleasure or to avoid pain. The poet’s task is to represent such a way of acting, real or fictitious, in some medium in a certain way. An orderly representation of this kind starts from an (again, real or fictitious) person’s decision to prefer or avoid something. It closely follows this agent’s ‘quality’ (poiótēs), which is to say his or her character. Thereby, the poet can achieve a congruence of all parts of the entire action with one another and with the whole. This is what, in Aristotle’s view, is the poet’s task. At the time of the reception of Aristotle’s “Poetics” around 1500 AD, the understanding of poetry was widely shaped by Horace and Cicero and hence had a strongly rhetorical character. For Horace, it is true, the poet ought to be an imitator, as well, even though an ‘erudite’ imitator. In Horace’s view, however, his knowledge regards the general manners of man. Therefore, the poet, gifted as such with ‘prophetic eye’ and ‘wisdom,’ has the ability to express this knowledge in vivid and concrete terms (communia proprie dicere). This knowledge, which men, parents, brothers, politicians, judges, military commanders, etc. use to act was considered to be learnable according to the rules of rhetoric, although it is only by the poet’s individual talent that it can become art. It was believed that what Aristotle had called the ‘probable’ could be equated with this skill based on acquired experience and genius. As a consequence of this reinterpretation, Aristotelian probability, which makes a certain man talk and act in a certain way in accordance with his character, changed into the probability of the course of the world. The order of the action was turned into the order of things as the object of imitation. The development of art and literature as well as of the aesthetic theories of the modern age was essentially influenced by the concept of an order of things and thus impedes access to the rationality of poetry envisioned by Aristotle.

Wenn auch viel über die Beziehung zwischen Literatur und Philosophie nachgedacht worden ist, sind entscheidende Fragen noch offengeblieben, z.B. die Frage des Verhältnisses zwischen der prinzipiell ästhetischen Verfasstheit literarischer Texte und dem ebenfalls prinzipiell rational-logischen Argumentationsmodus philosophischer Texte und die Frage der Bedingungsfaktoren der seit der Antike fruchtbaren Interdependenz von Philosophie und Literatur, die als Signum einer Kultur gelten kann, in der Dichten und Denken koexistieren und vielfach auch konvergieren. Der Band widmet sich Erscheinungsformen und Spielarten der Interaktion von Philosophie und Literatur, so dem Mimesis-Konzept von der antiken Philosophie bis zur modernen Literaturtheorie, dem Denken der Vorsokratiker, das in der Moderne wieder aufgegriffen wurde, der antiken Gattung des Gedankenexperiments und seiner Bedeutung bis zur Gegenwart. Platons Ring des Gyges wird als antiker Ursprung der Vorstellung des unsichtbaren Menschen herausgestellt. Ein Beitrag untersucht die ethische Dimension der Literatur, ein weiterer Freges Deutung der Sprache der Poesie. Fallstudien beschäftigen sich mit Ciceros intrikater Verwendung des Dialogs, Hölderlins Umsetzung der Philosophie in Literatur, Hegels Vergeistigung der Kunst, Schopenhauers Literarisierung der Philosophie, Wallace Stevens’ lyrischem Philosophieren, der Assimilation von Derridas Denken bei Francis Ponge, der Bedeutung moderner wissenschaftlicher Theorien bei Samuel Beckett und anderen postmodernen Romanciers und mit der Anverwandlung asiatischer Philosophie im Werk des amerikanischen Lyrikers Gary Snyder.

Despite its predominantly maritime subjects, the work of the German-speaking Luxembourgish poet Jean Krier presents itself from its debut (“Breton Islands,” 1994) as a deconstruction of classical nature poetry. Jean Krier’s poems thus stand in a tradition that goes back to Schiller and extends to the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno in ratifying the state of man’s separation from nature. Krier’s aesthetic procedure is based on the deconstruction of linguistic material that is subjected to states of play (mots-valises, homophonies, polyphonies, word lists, etc.). His poetry thus becomes a modern form of literary criticism in which disparate flotsam and junk-language reflect each other.

Loreley, a natural-born femme fatale from German mythology, has inspired poets since Romanticism. From a contemporary perspective, however, this character has simply lost her magical qualities and, at the same time, been transformed into a gatekeeper and an advocate for nature under threat in the Anthropocene. This article concerns the poetics surrounding Loreley – including the use of irony, role report, metamorphosis, and inspiration – in Franz Josef Czernin’s sonnet, „nach loreley“, Ulla Hahn’s „Ars poetica“ and „Meine Loreley“, Uwe Kolbe’s „Halle-Lureley“, and Peter Rühmkorf’s „Hochseil“. Loreley’s broken modernity does not only re veal her own abused nature. She is also promoted to a postmodern ‚Zudichterin‘ (Ernst Robert Curtius), reading the book of nature through semiotics rather than in terms of originality and creation.

This article investigates the relation between nature, ethics, and poetics in the work of Paul Celan, using „Engführung“ [“Stretto”] as a starting point. The readings from Celan’s library testify to his careful rethinking of what “reality” means. Applying the terminology and research of geology, physics, and, in particular, quantum mechanics, opens up an interpretative horizon for Celan’s poetry that can be configured according to the laws of entanglement as well as the form of a multidimensional ‚Raumgitter‘. The human and ethical elements of intentionality and being-in-the-world are not obliterated but rather subordinated to the natural itself. Celan goes beyond the idea of a subject-observer of the world-as-object and offers us a perspective in which language, as well as humanity and intentionality (poetic and otherwise), is merely one cosmic manifestation – part of nature itself. Language, like nature, shows different and changing states of being. It can be metamorphic but also sedimentary; conglomerate but also fluid like the elements present in nature. It is not a metaphorical analogy but a changing material state. It is non-local, dynamic, and provisional, like the relationality of quantum aggregations. Writing ‚nach der Natur‘ is, for Celan, who makes the knowledge and vocabulary of the natural sciences his own, to recover this metamorphic, provisional dimension of language – inside and outside time, probabilistic, invisible at a macroscopic level. By writing in and as nature in this way, poetry resists the destruction of what “happened” [geschehen] at the camps in the most devastating way.

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.

Nicolaus Cusanus presents a subtle theory of alterity. We will show why Cusanus does not consistently assign humans a position superior to other living beings, even when strong anthropocentric arguments seem to be present. Kazuhiko Yamaki (2017: 280), e.g., has recently pointed out that the attribution of a privileged position to humans in the world already fails logically, because the complicatio-explicatio scheme applies to all creatures. I would like to follow up on Yamaki’s argument that Cusanus at this point is rather concerned with describing a specific relationship between God and the creatures or the world. If this argument is extended to the question of humans and animals in Cusanus as a whole, the way in which these relations are to be figured becomes the focus of consideration. Just as Cusanus, in cosmology and anthropology, examines the perspectivity of knowledge and the decentralization of the Earth (as a noble star among other stars) without falling into pure perspectivism or decentralism, so traits of this reflective and (figuratively) ‘living’ thinking must also apply to the description of the relationship of living beings to one another or in relation to their Creator.

This article argues that Nicholas of Cusa, in contrast to the scholastic tradition and in consensus with the humanists of his time, develops a high esteem for Artes Me chanicae, placing it on an equal level with Artes Liberales. A close reading of the relevant passages in Cusa’s work reveals that although his early philosophical writings present the old scholastic position, in the Idiota-writings (1450), he shifts his stance toward the Artes Mechanicae and significantly elevates it. Influenced by his encounter with the Italian humanists in Rome, he maintains this approach throughout his late works and late sermons. This positive reweighting of Artes Mechanicae is consistent with Cusanus’ view of the immanence of God and leads him to revaluate his world view.

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.

Alongside the relationship between philosophy and painting, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a speculative interest emerged in the concept of three-dimensional vision in Cusa, Jan van Eyck, Marsilio Ficino, and Giorgione da Castelfranco. The visio circularis theme becomes a central metaphor for a new way of thinking and seeing the world, which culminates in Leonardo da Vinci’s studies on perspective. In this context, the mirror forms a dominant theme in the development of the studies and applications of perspective, which becomes increasingly sensitive to sculptural relief.

“Art and Technology in Nicholas of Cusa” discusses a basic assumption of the Central European ‘Weltanschauung’ since the early modern period. The two terms and their relationship to each other represent formative parameters that extend up to the present, in the so-called Anthropocene. An exemplary relevance of these terms can be found in Nicholas of Cusa. It comes to light in the development of art and technique between Cusanus and Leonardo da Vinci (G. Cuzzo). In Cusa’s philosophy, conjectural thinking forms the systematic core of this approach (C. D'Amico and J. González Rios). This thinking points in two directions, in that art and thought in Cusanus’ reception of Neoplatonism and its independent appropriation lead to scientia aenigmatica , which at the same time manifests itself in technical images. (W.C. Schneider). Thereby, the liberal and the mechanical arts experience the same high esteem (K. Yamaki). For Nicholas, technology proves to be a form of expression of the “viva imago Dei” and its creative art; thus, Cusa characterizes two different forms of consciousness: the reflexive self-consciousness of science and technology as well as the creative consciousness of spiritual self-development (H. Schwaetzer). Cusa applied this concept also to humans and animals, and hence to nature in general (K. Zeyer).  The present volume not only contributes to research on Cusanus but also provides a specimen for comparative studies of different forms of consciousness.

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.