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Diese Arbeit untersucht die sogenannte Eifeler Regel des Luxemburgischen, die die Tilgung des auslautenden -n unter bestimmten lautlichen und lexikalischen Bedingungen beschreibt, anhand eines umfangreichen maschinenlesbaren Textkorpus. Ziel ist es, die Faktoren zu identifizieren, die den Erhalt oder die Tilgung des -n in der Schriftsprache beeinflussen, und diese empirisch zu modellieren. Zunächst werden die kontextuellen Bedingungen der n-Tilgung analysiert, anschließend die Eigenschaften der betroffenen Lexeme. Die korpusbasierten Auswertungen zeigen signifikante Zusammenhänge zwischen dem Tilgungsverhalten und Merkmalen wie Wortart, orthographischer Struktur (insbesondere Doppel-n-Schreibung) sowie phonologischen Eigenschaften der Auslautsilbe, vor allem der Vokalqualität. Substantive und bestimmte phonologische Muster erweisen sich dabei als besonders tilgungsresistent. Auf dieser Grundlage wird ein unüberwachtes, regelinduzierendes Lernverfahren vorgestellt, das aus orthographischen Merkmalen ein Klassifikationsmodell für -n-auslautende Lexeme ableitet. Das Modell wird hinsichtlich Genauigkeit und Vollständigkeit optimiert und zeigt eine gute Leistungsfähigkeit bei der Anwendung auf reale luxemburgische Texte.

Frauenrollen in der Qing-Literatur (2026)

Karst, Julia

Diese Arbeit befasst sich mit einem historischen Zeitraum des Wandels in China: der Qing-Dynastie (1644–1912). Dabei werden Prosawerke (xiaoshuo 小说) aus einer Zeit relativer Isolation mit denen aus einer Zeit des Semi-Kolonialismus in China verglichen, zeitlich getrennt durch das Trauma des 19. Jahrhunderts. Wie genau wurden Frauen in solchen Prosawerken repräsentiert und inwiefern spiegelten die Autoren dabei, bewusst oder unbewusst, die gesellschaftlichen Werte ihrer Zeit wider? Ist der Wandel von Tradition zu Moderne anhand der Figur der Frau zu spüren, noch vor dem radikalen Einschnitt der 4.-Mai-Bewegung? Um diese Fragen zu beantworten, werden in dieser Arbeit diverse Frauenfiguren und ihre Liebesbeziehungen aus vier ausgewählten populären Werken der frühen und späten Qing untersucht. Konkret handelt es sich dabei um die Charaktere Lianxiang 莲香 in Liaozhai zhiyi 聊斋志异, Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 in Honglou meng 红楼梦, Dihua 棣华 in Hen hai 恨海, sowie Fu Caiyun 傅彩云 in Niehai hua 孽海花. Einige dieser Figuren werden als vorbildliche Frauen präsentiert, andere hingegen als moralisch verwerfliche Widersacher, dabei rückt jedoch der zeitliche Kontext der Werke diese Charaktereigenschaften in ein neues Licht.

Politikwissenschaftlicher Jahresrückblick 2025 des Trierer Institut für Demokratie- und Parteienforschung (2026)

Essays in Price Measurement with Statistical and Machine Learning Methods (2025)

Radjabov, Botir

Price indices play a vital role in economic measurement as they reflect price levels and measure price fluctuations. Price level measures are used with macroeconomic indicators to express them in real terms. These measures are also used to index wages, rents, and pensions. Furthermore, they are used as a reference for monetary policy conducted by central banks. Therefore, the provision of accurate price indices is one of the most important goals of National Statistical Institutes (NSIs), and numerous studies have been devoted to this goal. This cumulative dissertation also contributes to this goal. It contains four chapters, each of which represents a separate research. The first two studies are devoted to the treatment of seasonal products by using different price index methods. The first research is co-authored with Ken van Loon. The third research is dedicated to finding the most accurate method to make price predictions for missing products. The fourth research is focused on the treatment of products by using different price index methods when products’ quality characteristics are available.

Der Traum von der ökologischen Demokratie – Bruchlinien einer politischen Synthetik (2026)

Scherer, Tim

Von der Begeisterung zur Stimmung. Zur Darstellung des Geistes bei Novalis (2025)

Kariya, Shoko

This article interprets Novalis' expression of spirit (Geist) across his oeuvre, ranging from his early work "On Inspiration" to his major novels "The Novices of Sais" and "Heinrich von Ofterdingen". His view of the world is based on the Christian dichotomy between "the spirit and the letter" (,,Geist und Buchstabe") and in his works he considers how we might once again achieve the spirit of nature through human written language. However, even the act of inspiration is for him not a total exchange with the spirit of nature, because it is also a moment of producing artwork, and therefore a moment of division between the human and nature. He therefore attempts to reproduce the ideal unity between nature and the human through the representation of atmosphere, which is composed of harmony between several voices in the world as well as various dimensions of times and spaces. This article interprets the above representation as a poetic experiment that seeks to express the spirit through an internally diverse written language, in other words, as an attempt to describe unity as a plurality.

Das Atmosphärische des Erdgeistes in Goethes Faust I (2025)

Hisayama, Yuho

This paper examines the atmospheric character of the Erdgeist (Earth Spirit) in Goethe's Faust, Part I. Goethe's Earth Spirit can be regarded as atmospheric both in the sense of New Phenomenology and in relation to the ancient concept of pneuma or spiritus, which originally meant breath, wind, and atmosphere. Similar language appears in the first volume of Herder's Älteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts (1774), a possible background for Goethe's conception of the Earth Spirit in his so-called Urfaust (before 1775). Yet, Goethe's portrayal departs from Herder's by emphasizing the Earth Spirit's position in between light and darkness, life and death, heaven and earth, a liminal quality more or less absent from Herder's framework. By also analysing Goethe's later sketch of the Earth Spirit (1810-1812?) and his plans to stage it in the theatre, this paper argues that Goethe has continually been aware of the atmospheric character of the Earth Spirit, while, over time, its in-between nature progressively transformed into a Jupiter-like simplified figure.

Atmosphären und Sphären bei Johannes Kepler: Perspektiven eines neuzeitlichen Denkens für die Moderne (2025)

Schwaetzer, Harald

Johannes Kepler's thinking represents a central turning point in the development of the modern understanding of atmosphere. Kepler takes up the ancient conception of the cosmos as a whole divided into living and animated spheres, but reshapes it using specifically modern scientific and epistemological approaches. This gives rise to a view of the Earth as an animated organism, which prefigures modern concepts of atmosphere against the background of a comprehensive vitality of nature. Furthermore, Kepler's embedding of his reflections in the context of astrological prognostics enriches the modern aesthetic discussion with a remarkable perspective: prognostic, i.e. temporal, perception of atmosphere.

Die Übung zur visio facialis inmitten alltäglicher Umwelt (2025)

Yamaki, Kazuhiko

Nicholas of Cusa's treatise 'De visione Dei' aims to introduce the reader to the practice of mystical experience. The treatise is usually interpreted from the beginning of the work. The experiments with the all-seeing eicona dei form the framework. The thesis of this article is that the entire content of Cusa's treatise can only be understood if one considers the book as a whole and reflects on its composition. The main point is that the author, Cardinal and Bishop of Brixen, Cusanus, carried out this practice alone in his own room in the bishop's residence and that the content of this work was written as a record of this practice. Thus, the performativity of the atmosphere proves to be decisive for the content of the text.

Nichts anderes als Karfunkel (2025)

Bücker, Pilar

The carbuncle as a Christological symbol of atmosphere in Nicholas of Cusa - with reference to the late antique and medieval gemstone allegory. In his De non aliud, Nicholas of Cusa applies the carbuncle as a Christological aenigma, which can be understood as an exemplary object of atmosphere due to its dual nature of light substance and mineral substance. The article will show that the meaning of the carbuncle image as the epistemological method is so closely linked to the character and form of thought in De non alud that an examination of the meaning of the carbuncle in its historical allegory contributes to the question of image theory in Cusanus. By that the question is answered to which extent this far-reaching meaning of the carbuncle can shed light on the anagogic dimension of the perception of atmosphere.

Atmosphären in der europäischen Geistesgeschichte (2025)

Schwaetzer, Harald

The volume is dedicated to the concept of atmosphere. It deals with the precursors of it, especially from the early modern times to German Romantic Philosophy. It draws a genetic line from the Renaissance (with two contributions on Nicholas of Cusa) to the early modern period (Kepler) and on to the modern era (Goethe and Novalis). It becomes evident that all of the authors discussed already have concepts of atmosphere that can be understood as precursors to the current phenomenological understanding. This volume is based on a conference held at the Kobe Institute for Atmospheric Studies in September 2023.

Internationale Zeitschrift für Kulturkomparatistik Bd. 13 (2025): Atmosphären in der europäischen Geistesgeschichte (2025)

Der deutsch-japanische Band widmet sich dem in der neuen Phänomenologie, vor allem bei Schmitz und Böhme, diskutierten Begriff der Atmosphäre. Anders als die meisten eher systematisch orientierten Ansätze wählt der Band einen historischen Zugang. Dass historische Wurzeln bei Goethe liegen, mit dem Schmitz wie Böhme sich intensiv beschäftigt haben, ist bekannt. Bislang ist aber der Frage nach der Geschichte des Atmosphären-Begriffs und seiner Vorläufer wenig Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt worden. Der Band unternimmt es deswegen, eine Linie zu verfolgen, die von Goethe (Hisayama) und Novalis (Kariya) zu Kepler (Schwaetzer), der für beide eine wichtige Referenz war, und von da aus zu Nikolaus von Kues (Yamaki) und dessen Situierung in Mittelalter und Antike (Bücker) zurückgeht. Er will mit diesem exemplarischen historischen Zugang die systematische Fruchtbarkeit einer geistesgeschichtlichen Perspektive für die Entwicklung einer Philosophie der Atmosphäre zeigen.

CYBERPUNK – GAME – POETRY: Rostislav Amelin’s “SimStab” (2024)

Leiderman, Daniil ; Lipovetsky, Mark

The article discusses “SimStab” [Simulator of Stability], a poetic performance by a young Russian poet, Rostislav Amelin, as an effective hybrid of the innovative poetry, video game, and the cyberpunk genre models. The interaction of these components produces strong, yet not necessarily obvious political over-tones, testing the limits of the audience’s (or readers’, or players’) agency. Like many other cyberpunk texts, “SimStab” explores the conflict between the desire to resist colonization by the pervasive powers dominating contemporary society, and the absolute necessity of willingly colonizing your own body and subjectivity with the products of these powers. Both the poem, game and their shared text embody spaces of utopia reliant on repressed sites of formless abjection, which paradoxically become a source of anarchic freedom. Thus, in “SimStab” the ludic algorithmic with its procedural rhetoric (Ian Bogost) creates spaces of formlessness which repeats the liberatory promise of cyberpunk literature.

Performative Translation: Latvia’s Orbita Group as a Post-Monolingual Heterotopia (2024)

Platt, Kevin M. F.

The Orbita multimedia and poetry collective, based in Riga, Latvia, has succeeded in making poetry written in Russian an integral part of the Latvian cultural and literary scene, despite the burden borne by Russian language and culture in this society as a result of still unsettled and contested histories of Russian and Soviet imperial domination and cultural imperialism. The article explains this achievement as resulting from the Orbita collective’s practices of “performative translation,” which make translation a highly visible and central element of various forms of artistic activity, including multimedia installations, book publishing, video poetry, public performance, proper, and more. In traditional cultural configurations, translation is thought to transfer the essential features or the spirit of a text from one literary language to another in a manner that makes possible the translation’s readers’ sense of unmediated contact with the original. Such a conception of translation supports the monolingual paradigm – the cultural ideology of separate and distinct national languages – and the political actualities to which it corresponds. Orbita’s practices of performative translation, in contrast, create a multilingual heterotopia in which the actuality of translation as mediation is rendered visible, the boundedness and distinctiveness of national literary languages is undermined, and the social necessity and ubiquity of acts of translation is brought to the fore.

«Вот скажем лицом я в Китае». Стереотипы и имаготипы Китая, китайца и китайского в практике обращения к чужому в геопоэтике и геоэстетике Дмитрия Пригова (2024)

Grübel, Rainer

The article considers the circulation and the role of the motifs China, the Chinese man/woman and the Chinese as concepts of the other/strange(r), which negatively correspond to the concepts of the self in the work of the Russian poet, writer, artist and producer of performances Dmitrij Prigov. These phenomena and their historical development are of special interest in the present context of the Russian war against Ukraine, the Western sanctions against Russia and the growing political, economic and military approximation of Russia to China. In its analytic design the article discerns in Prigov’s China-text a broader geo-esthetical from a smaller geo-poetical horizon and distinguishes the theme- and sense-orientated phenomenon of stereotype, reducing (the concept of) a culture or a nation to special, often discrediting it, semantic features (as topoi), from the phenomenon of the imagotype, which is orientated to the poetical and/or esthetical construction of an artifact and relates the specialty of the other to certain sounds, intonations, colors, textures. Reconstructing the development of the motifs of China, the Chinese man/woman and the Chinese in Prigov’s China-text from the 1970s up to the posthumously in 2013 published novel “Katia, the Chinese”, the article shows that the evolution of the imagotypes and stereotypes of China, the Chinese man / woman and the Chinese as concepts of the other/alien is correlated with the development of the geopolitical relation of Russia and China.

Breaking up the Canon of Literary Modernity: Classicism in the Ecopoetics of David Hinton and the Materialism of Zeng Shaoli. A Preliminary Outline of Epistemological Changes in Contemporary American and Chinese Lyricism (2024)

Kraushaar, Frank

The target of this essay is to open possible pathways to approach the phenomenon of a self-remodeling of classicist poetry in the 20th and early 21st century by focusing on the process from two different angles rarely perceived as related to each other: first, the remodeling of Chinese lyrical classicism through a strand of modern American poetry harking back to Ezra Pound and currently crystallized in the translations of David Hinton and, second, the transition that modern Chinese poetry written in classical language and conforming to prosodic rules of classical style poetry, sometimes referred to as “old style poetry” jiu ti shi, underwent after its rebirth as “unofficial” poetry online since the beginning of this century. Although there are obviously no direct links between the aforementioned tradition of modern American poetry and neoclassicist cyberpoets like Zeng Shaoli I argue that in both cases the classicist inspiration and poetic drive is motivated by concern with the increasing imbalance between natural, social, and individual resources, on the one hand, and an indomitable desire to accumulate economic and political power on the other. A permanent devaluation of language in the human realm, matched by a permanent devaluation of currencies in the economic sphere, provokes poetic responses in the very interest of humanity. The neoclassicist lyricisms that I draw into comparison display both subtle distinctions and common traits in this response to the starkly different environments of their respective contemporary literary scenes.

From Incoherence to Sustainability: Performance, Activism, and Social Media in the Most Recent Russian Poetry (2024)

Korchagin, Kirill

This article considers the evolution of poetic performance on the basis of several Russian poets of the 2010s. The type of performance in question, which originally implied active absorption in the poetic text, occupied an important place in Russian art of the twentieth century – from the first experiments of the historical avant-garde to Moscow Conceptualism (above all, in the their “Collective Actions”). As such, it has always maintained a closeness to the poetic work and was most often practiced by poets who sought to extend their texts beyond the space of the page and into the “external” world. In the 2010s, however, with the development of social media, the opposite trend is noticeable – poets, while declaring their connection to the performative traditions of Moscow Conceptualism, transfer their performative activity into a textual space organized by social media platforms. The central hypothesis of this article is that all of these poets react differently to the methods of discursive organization provided (and enforced) by social networks and strive in different ways to liberate themselves from the censorship of the algorithm: some emphasize the discursive incoherence of the platform, while others, on the contrary, seek to develop a sustainable manner of uniting private discourses into a new totality.

Poezija kao luksuz i sredstvo preživljanja (2024)

Djurić, Dubravka ; Bošković, Aleksandar

The paper focuses on two blogger-poets, Maja Solar and Jelena Savić, who create poetry and conceptualize the relationship between philosophy and politics. Maja Solar is a refugee from Croatia, now living in Serbia, who sometimes mixes Serbian and Croatian language standards. In her poems, she combines the lyrical with the experimental, while in her essays, she critically reflects on neo-liberalism. The authors discuss her dual position(s), as a poet and philosopher active in the Gerusija philosophy collective from Novi Sad. Jelena Savić is a poet of Romani descent, whose poetry takes identity politics as both its point of departure and object of critique. The authors examine how her experimental writing embodies this dual position. More specifically, the paper investigates how Solar and Savić construct themselves online as engaged intellectuals, poets and writers. In the case of Maja Solar, the authors focus on “Ispod crte”, a blog created by the collective “Za kulturne politike: politika kulture”, and the Gerusija collective’s magazine “Stvar”. By using these examples, the authors review her place in the micro-social map of younger critical intellectuals. In her blog “Usernamekaspoetry: Biti žena, Romkinja, pesnikinja”, Jelena Savić discusses her paradoxical position as an almost invisible poet in the national context, and questions the place of minorities within the nationally homogenous Serbian society. In 2017, Savić started writing about problems of education in the regional e-magazine “Proлetter” and her work became more visible in the post-Yugoslav context.

Дискурсивный коллаж в стихах Натальи Романовой (2024)

Barkovskaja, Nina

As an object, the last three books of N. Romanova’s poems are considered: “Atrocity” («Зверство»), “Cannibalism” («Людоедство» –both 2015), “Textbook of literature for morons” («Учебник литературы для придурков», 2019). Her works can be attributed to the St. Petersburg branch of the counterculture. Performative, transgressive “trash poetry” of Romanova is a speech gesture of illocutionary nature. Her “offensive art” violates the norms of decency, common sense, tolerance, and poetic canon. The texts are built as a collage of fragments of discursive practices: fake news, ideological clichés, allusions to the classics, youth jargon of hipsters, vulgarisms and obscene vocabulary. Romanova’s poetry demonstrates the devastation of cultural signs, the grotesque idiocy of the overwhelming mass of consumer society.

Код-«мусор» – кривой почерк – опечатка: несовершенство как литературный приём в цифровой эре (2024)

Rutten, Ellen

In this digitized age, we witness a transnational interest in the ‘aesthetics of imperfection’ – aesthetic gestures that foreground shortcomings, mistakes, and flaws. Blockbusters shot with cheap cameras, trash fashion, consciously blurry photos, glitch music: for the cultural producers and consumers of these and other aesthetic practices, the unpolished object is not a taboo but rather an asset or a hallmark of sincerity, authenticity, and other positive values. With the help of existing scholarship, in this article, I will study and compare the writings of three Russian poets/artists: Vera Khlebnikova, Vera Pavlova, and Linor Goralik. Each uses conceptual as well as formal, grammatical, and/or stylistic imperfections as an aesthetic device. The aim of my analysis is to juxtapose and historically contextualize the social anxieties that inform these and other present-day creative practices that foreground the imperfect.

Как научиться не писать стихи (текст-перформанс) (2024)

Arsen‘ev, Pawel

This text is a free and intradiegetic interpretation of what took place at dusk on the 15th of February in the city of Giessen, in the German federated state of Hesse, at one of the last conferences of Slavists on the very brink of the pandemic era.

Preliminary Note (2024)

Stahl, Henrieke

This volume brings together contributions addressing the intersections of political poetry, performativity, and the internet. The essays are based on presentations given at workshops and conferences organized by the DFG Centre for Advanced Studies “Russian-Language Poetry in Transition: Poetic Forms of Dealing with Boundaries of Genre, Language, Culture and Society between Europe, Asia and America” (2017-2023). The conferences took place in 2018-2019, at a time when neither the coronavirus pandemic nor Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine were foreseeable, and the contributions have not been updated in light of these catastrophes. The articles presented here deal with recent poetry and focus on the connection between politics, performativity, and the internet in multiple literatures and intercultural relations. Although the majority of these texts belong to the Russophone world, poetry from Serbia, Latvia, and China is also considered. The contributors demonstrate, on the one hand, how newer poetry softens genre distinctions and formally tends towards multimedia hybridization and, on the other, how it transcends or dissolves linguistic, cultural, and social boundaries. Dr. Ekaterina Friedrichs and Ms. Lena Rosalin Schwarz were involved in preparing this publication for printing. We would like to thank them both for their careful review and wonderful cooperation.

Internationale Zeitschrift für Kulturkomparatistik Bd. 12 (2024): Political Poetry, Performativity, and the Internet (2024)

The articles presented in this volume deal with recent poetry and focus on the connection between politics, performativity, and the internet in multiple literatures and intercultural relations. Although the majority of these texts belong to the Russophone world, poetry from Serbia, Latvia, and China is also considered. The contributors demonstrate, on the one hand, how newer poetry softens genre distinctions and formally tends towards multimedia hybridization and, on the other, how it transcends or dissolves linguistic, cultural, and social boundaries.

Töne, Licht und Quallen: Metaphorische Verschiebungen in Inger Christensens „Gopler“ und Pia Tafdrups „De fem sanser“ (2024)

Fürstenberg, Henrike

Metaphorical shifts from one subject area to another are a central structural strategy in Inger Christensen’s work. This principle will be demonstrated and discussed in this paper by referring to the poem “Gopler” [“Jellyfish”] from “lys” [“light”], 1962. The Danish contemporary poet Pia Tafdrup, whose work is influenced by Christensen, also makes use of a distinctive, associative imagery in her pentalogy “De fem sanser” [“The Five Senses”] (2014–2022). This paper contrastively explores the ways in which metaphorical shifts function in Christensen’s and Tafdrup’s poetry. Christensen realizes the metaphors’ potential in a radical way through the semantic superimposition of different subject areas. Thus, the regularities of the designed world are solely valid within linguistic structures, opening up new spaces of cognitive experience. In Tafdrup’s work, the texts’ different levels of meaning tend to remain separable. Here, the focus is on an associative technique of erratic and surprising transmissions, often applied to the external and the internal in a way that the cutting conciseness of the poems touch the reader almost sensually.

Comparing Inger Christensen and Birgitta Trotzig (2024)

Ringgaard, Dan

The essay compares Inger Christensen’s (1935-2009) poetry and poetics with the work of the Swedish writer Birgitta Trotzig (1929-2011). It tests the potential of comparison by asking what happens if we compare what might be the two most prominent women writers of Nordic post-war modernism, two writers whose paths have crossed over the years. The first half of the paper traces a shared constellation of motifs (eye/butterfly/death) within two books of poetry, Trotzig’s “Anima” (1982) and Christensen’s “Sommerfugledalen” (1991). The initial comparison of motifs leads to a shared poetics. It offers a trotzig’ian version of Inger Christensen’s version of the condition of secrecy and fundamental parallels in their philosophy of language and the subject. But it also points to a major difference between the real as a mystic category in Trotzig and Inger Christensen’s more seamless, lucid, and dreamlike style. Advancing further into a stylistic comparison the linguistic and visionary abundancy of Trotzig’s “Anima”-poems reveals an overlooked quality in Christensen’s: That Christensen’s poems are also luxurious, albeit, typically, with moderation. The balancing of sense and sensibility appears by comparison to be a key trait in her poetry, highlighting its classical inclination. The paper demonstrates how comparison makes its subject visible by way of the other, and how comparison points out new nuances or flavors in the texts as it opens a conversation between two major women writers of Nordic modernism.

Worte und Dinge und Worte als Dinge. Selbstreferenz in Inger Christensens „alfabet“ und Herta Müllers Collagen im „Schreibheft“ Nr. 74 (2024)

Thielsen, Jill

Inger Christensen’s alfabet is one of the most formative contributions in Danish eco-poetry that also initiates a broad reception of Christensen’s œuvre in German literature. Besides the ecocritical tendencies the text establishes a self-referential dimension that deals with the relation between a human speaker, its speaking about ‘world’ and its reference. In this regard the text implicitly debates the verbal material and its (connotative) semantics that one has to use. This dimension of alfabet is one of the main linking points for a productive reception by Herta Müller. Especially her collages published in Schreibheft expose the materiality of linguistic signs and speech. In addition to this, the specific constitution of the collages which are made of newspapers and magazines shows that linguistic signs not only refer to a real reference but also (and mainly) to discourses and other prior communicative contexts.

Textile Textuality in Inger Christensen: “Letter in April” and Amalie Smith: “Thread Ripper” (2024)

Rösing, Lilian Munk

Departing from Roland Barthes’ association of text and textile, and feminist theory on weaving as text production, this article analyzes the textile qualities of Inger Christensen’s “Letter in April” (1979) and Amalie Smith’s “Thread Ripper” (2020). In “Letter in April”, Christensen establishes a connection between writing and spinning or weaving through their shared temporality of varied repetition. In “Thread Ripper” Smith alludes to Christensen and makes of the continuity between text and textile not only the main theme of the book, but also its structuring principle. Through a materialist conception of the text, regarding it as a woven fabric, the article focuses on the textual patterns of the two works (stylistic figures in Christensen, graphic composition in Smith). The connection from Christensen to Smith leads to a further connection to ecocritical conceptions of weaving as no less than a cosmological principle. On a concluding note, the article argues that weaving is not only connecting, but also disconnecting, cutting.

Sommervögel finden: Ornitophonische Übersetzungspoetiken bei Mette Moestrup und Nico Bleutge (2024)

Heine, Stefanie

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.

„Verdichtung der Sprachmaterie“ – Thomas Kling und Oswald Egger im Dialog mit Inger Christensen (2024)

Müller-Wille, Klaus

In order to shed light on the important function Inger Christensen had for the German poetry scene in the 1990s and 2000s, the article examines texts by Thomas Kling and Oswald Egger. The central argument is that both Kling and Egger drew on Christensen’s sophisticated nature-philosophical inspired poetics in “det”/“das” to break away from an experimental poetry that is primarily interested in questions of language and media theory. Both seem to be particularly fascinated by Christensen’s attempt to think of the relationship between language and the world in terms of a chiastic entanglement, which shows clear traces of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception. But despite this similarity, they react very differently to the poetological considerations of the Danish poet. Both do not adopt Christensen’s reflections uncritically but attempt to utilize them for their own aesthetic purposes.

Heliocentric Utopianism: Ecological Imagination and Utopian Longing in Inger Christensen and in Contemporary Danish Literature (2024)

Nexø, Tue Andersen

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.

Apfelernten mit Inger Christensen. (Silke Scheuermann, Jan Wagner, Uljana Wolf) (2024)

Al-Taie, Yvonne

Inger Christensen, maybe the most vividly received Danish writer in contemporary German poetry, is often discussed in the light of her poetry’s formal innovativeness. This paper will shift the focus on poetry’s relation to the world as another aspect repeatedly addressed by contemporary German poets when referring to Christensen’s work. Discussing three essays by Silke Scheuermann, Jan Wagner, and Uljana Wolf this paper traces their approaches to Inger Christensen’s poetry with a particular interest in personal encounters with nature and real-world sensual experiences as the core and outset of Inger Christensen’s poetic writings. The paper tries to conceptualize this perspective on her poetry by referring to the Haiku as a form of poetry that depicts a sensual and affective experience of nature along with Roland Barthes related concept of tangibilia on the one hand and to the sociological concept of resonance as developed by Hartmut Rosa on the other.

Inger Christensen in Edenkoben (2024)

Bergmann, Franziska

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.

Sommerfugle | Sommervögel. Einleitung (2024)

Heine, Stefanie ; Al-Taie, Yvonne

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.

Internationale Zeitschrift für Kulturkomparatistik Bd. 11 (2024): dal|tal|zahl. Inger Christensen und die Gegenwartslyrik (2024)

Plamen Dojnovs „Ball der Tyrannen“. Paradoxien des Politischen in der zeitgenössischen bulgarischen Lyrik (2023)

Schmidt, Henrike

In 2016, the Bulgarian poet and philologist Plamen Doynov initiated a poetic project called “The New Political Poetry” (NPP). Doynov presented examples of his new political poems at two readings in 2016 and 2019 and published “fragments of a manifesto” in his poetry collection “The Tyrants’ Ball” (2016). The NPP strives to overcome the trauma of politicized ideological writing in the communist era. This article analyzes Doynov’s NPP project against the background of a general tendency towards political engagement in literature that has recently emerged in Bulgaria as well as elsewhere in Europe and beyond. It posits that Doynov’s New Political Poetry, alongside other literary trends in contemporary Bulgaria, paradoxically addresses the political precisely by returning art to heightened cultural autonomy, and rejects the idea of engagement in a narrower sense.

Die Leere des Politischen: Null-Texte zwischen Performance und Demonstration (2023)

Pavlovets, Mikhail

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.’

Russischer Kulturimperialismus und seine Subversion: Ivan Volkovs „Mazepa“ und Aleksandr Puškins „Poltava“ (2023)

Stahl, Henrieke

The essay will compare Pushkin’s “Poltava” (1828) and Ivan Volkov’s “Mazepa” (2014), a counterargument to Pushkin’s text. Volkov’s poem not only demonstrates the topicality of Pushkin’s classic but also reveals the latter’s hidden layers of meaning. Both poems renew the tradition of the verse epic. However, they turn the foundation story, typical for the epic, towards tragedy, focusing on the fall of Ukraine rather than the success of Russia’s imperial gesture. Volkov reverses the dominant perspectives and advances the Ukrainian point of view, while Pushkin displays a double-voiced strategy that disrupts the ostensible political message. The heroic panegyric also becomes fragile: in both poems, neither Mazepa nor Peter are ‘masters’ of history. Furthermore, in both texts, the status and function of the omniscient poet as epic narrator is challenged and transformed. Pushkin, in particular, uses his narrator as a mask; yet, in so doing, he also invites the reader to regard the ‘author,’ ‘Pushkin,’ with greater scrutiny and makes him a device that structures the work as a whole. Finally, in both poems, Ukraine’s lost fight for independence in a past age reflects a lack of freedom within the Russian state. Pushkin’s and Volkov’s poems are thus not so much texts about history as they are agents of history. Where they expose that history as constructed, they appeal to a critical position that would interrogate the driving narratives and political forces of the present.

What Makes a Poem Aggressive? A Comparison of Joseph Brodsky’s and Aleksandr Byvshev’s Versions of «На независимость Украины» [On the Independence of Ukraine] (2023)

Schlund, Katrin

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.

Relocating “China” in Contemporary American Poetry: The Case of Timothy Yu (2023)

Kunze, Rui

This article examines “China” in contemporary American poetry using the example of Timothy Yu’s poems, titled “Chinese Silence,” which rewrite and / or parody texts from the American literary canon as well as public communication. It proposes a hall-of-mirrors reading of these poems in order to show how Yu’s poems refer to, reflect on, and relocate other authors’ writing of “China.” It argues that Yu’s poems, instead of making claims for an authentic “China,” attempt to bring Chinese Americans’ lived experience into the American literary tradition.

Zwischen Forensik und Philologie: Przemysław Dakowicz und die nationalistische Lyrik im heutigen Polen (2023)

Herlth, Jens

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).

„Singstimmen, erhebt euch!“: Überlegungen zur Vertonung japanischer Protestlyrik seit 1945 (2023)

Masumoto, Hiroko

This article gives an overview of the tradition of setting Japanese protest poetry to music since 1945 and examines the relationship between the socio-political movement, poetry and music. In particular, it deals with the origin and development of the Utagoe movement, established shortly after the World War II, as well as the musical adaptation of politically relevant poetry, which has its origin in the tradition of Brecht’s song. These forms of setting Japanese protest poetry to music are associated with the poetic-musical works that were written immediately after the nuclear power plant accident in Fukushima in 2011.

Contemporary Japanese Poetry and Politics: An Overview (2023)

Morton, Leith

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).

Tactile Communism: Keti Chukhrov’s Post-Soviet Dramatic Works and the Legacy of Soviet Defectology (2023)

Osipova, Anastasiya

In this article, I analyze the character of hyper-naturalism and exaggerated tactility in dramatic poems by contemporary Russian-Georgian philosopher and writer Keti Chukhrov. I argue that, while descriptions of violence, physiological functions, and abject poverty are common for post-Soviet art, in Chukhrov’s work these elements perform radically different task than in the pessimistic and de-ideologized chernukha, or the style of grim realism. Her approach to matter is also distinct from the historic Russian avant-garde tradition, which relished intensified sensations but did not offer constructive ways of inscribing their immediacy into coherent cultural continuity. Instead, her dramatic poems bear pedagogical, even rehabilitative stakes for recuperating the individual sensations of alienated people into meaningful and shared cultural experiences. In this article, I discuss her approach to drama as mobilizing the tradition of Soviet Marxist defectology, a special educational method of socializing disabled, cognitively impaired, or otherwise disadvantaged people. Pioneered in the Soviet Union in the 1920s by Lev Vygotsky and suppressed in the 1930s, defectology found further application in the 1960s and 1970s in the work of the Zagorsk boarding school for the deafblind, led by Vygotsky’s student Alexander Mescheriakov and Evald Ilyenkov, a Marxist-Hegelian philosopher who is a central figure for Chukhrov’s philosophical research. One of the key tasks of Meshcheriakov and Ilyenkov was to help their deafblind students to overcome isolation through learning to translate their purely tactile sensations into deliberate communicative acts. While Zagorsk offered Ilyenkov an opportunity to test and apply his theory of the collectivist formation of personality, for Chukhrov it is theater that has become the sphere for experimental, practical extension of her scholarly research into Soviet Marxist thought and socialist culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Her dramatic texts offer models of alternative subjectivization for post-Soviet people to allow themselves once again to recognize the presence of universal values and greater cultural commons behind individual, alienated sensations and experiences.

„Die Antwort auf eine Frage ist in der Kritik der Frage selbst enthalten“. Karl Marx im transitiv poetisch-politischen Werk von Dmitrij Prigov (2023)

Grübel, Rainer

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.

„Die eiserne Maske der Freiheit“: Hans Magnus Enzensberger und Karl Marx (2023)

Lamping, Dieter

During the 1960s and 1970s the poetic reception of Karl Marx begins to increase in Germany. In this regard, it can be observed that Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s poetic and essayistic reception of Marx is not only quite complex, but also unorthodox. By focusing on the anthology „Gespräche mit Marx und Engels,“ edited by Enzensberger, his comedy „Der Untergang der Titanic“ and his poem „Karl Heinrich Marx,“ the diverse forms of reference to this philosopher are analyzed. It can be demonstrated that Enzensberger uses the montage technique masterly to avoid one-dimensional confessions.

Der junge Marx in der DDR-Lyrik (2023)

Geist, Peter

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.

Vorbemerkung (2023)

Stahl, Henrieke

Dieser Band versammelt Beiträge zum Thema Politik in der Gegenwartslyrik verschiedener Sprachen und Länder. Den Aufsätzen liegen Vorträge zugrunde, die im Rahmen von Workshops und Konferenzen der DFG-Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe „Russischsprachige Lyrik in Transition: Poetische Formen des Umgangs mit Grenzen der Gattung, Sprache, Kultur und Gesellschaft zwischen Europa, Asien und Amerika“ (2017-2023) gehalten wurden. Die Veranstaltungen fanden in den Jahren 2018-2019 statt – in einer Zeit, als weder die Corona-Pandemie noch der schreckliche Invasionskrieg Russlands in der Ukraine oder der Krieg im Gaza-Streifen absehbar waren.

Internationale Zeitschrift für Kulturkomparatistik Bd. 10 (2023): Contemporary Poetry and Politics (2023)

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.

Abschied von der Familie in der deutschschweizerischen Gegenwartsliteratur? (2022)

Müller, Ralph

According to a frequently encountered view, the family novel is not at all compatible with the modern phenomena of life. On closer inspection, however, it can be seen that such reproaches presuppose a trivialised genre that may be innovatively destroyed or renewed. In response to such reproaches, this article proposes a more general notion of family novel, denoting those narratives whose content and structure are essentially shaped by the relationship between characters in terms of intergenerational biological, cultural or material continuities or discontinuities. In addition, this article argues that the issues of intergenerational relationships still play a role. For instance, actual kinship without stable, affective relationships is an ongoing theme. However, there are Swiss German family novels in which the failure of establishing a strong emotional intergenerational relationship are narrated with a new relaxedness. Failing families or the renunciation of family attachment are no longer existential problems.

Les histoires de famille comme trames parallèles dans le roman à énigme: «Qui a tué Heidi?» de Marc Voltenauer (2022)

Malinovská, Zuzana

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.

Zum Bild der Familie in Hansjörg Schneiders Kriminalroman „Hunkelers Geheimnis“ im Kontext der Schweizer Flüchtlingspolitik in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (2022)

Jambor, Ján

This article focuses on detective novel „Hunkelers Geheimnis“ [“Hunkeler’s secret”] (2015), the ninth Peter Hunkeler novel by Swiss-German author Hansjörg Schneider (b. 1938). It sets out to treat in detail the image of the family relevant to this novel with regard to the characters of the perpetrator and murder victim, and to situate them in the historical context. Upon interpreting the text, the author of the present article draws not only on the attendant literature, but also on an interview conducted with the novelist in the form of letters. In the first part, the question of what role the motif of the family plays in the classic and post-classic crime novel, especially from German-speaking Switzerland, is explored. The presentation of the plot structure is followed by an analysis and interpretation of the event leading to a puzzling murder, which reflects Switzerland’s refugee policy during the Nazi period. The fourth part pays heed to the historical context of the event as well as Schneider’s interdiscursive work with specialised literature and historical sources. In the next part, attention is drawn to blurring the line between victim and perpetrator. The last part examines the detective’s family.

Une famille au-delà de la famille. Jean-François Haas, «Tu écriras mon nom sur les eaux» (2022)

Kolly, Valentin

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.

Les récits de filiation de Fleur Jaeggy: remonter les silences hérités du lexique familial (2022)

Collani, Tania

Fleur Jaeggy was born in Zurich in 1940 and she lives in Italy since the 1960s. The family reminiscences that spring from her autobiographical works – “I beati anni del castigo” (1989) and “Protelerka” (2001) −, are often detached, fragmentary, veined with melancholy and dominated by introspection, converging in the category of “filiation stories”, defined in 1999 by Dominique Viart. In fact, the author’s family history seems not to exist − it is broken up; it is incomplete and unknown for both the narrator and her reader. It is only once her parents have died and the heritage of objects, notebooks, photos, portraits and papers gathered that the construction of the family building can take place, by tracing the memories’ thread of the daughter. The desire of the narrator to go back up her genealogy without following a chronological thread and by trying to fill in the silences, the ellipses and the omissions, responds less to a poetics of representation than to a need for answers or to a questioning that became imperative at the time of writing. The work is, in this sense, less a portrait than an analysis.

„Immer wenn er gestorben war, kam er wieder zurück.“ Jüdische Lebenswelten und Erinnerungsräume in Charles Lewinskys „Melnitz“ (2022)

Schallié, Charlotte

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.

Le projet familial face à la société: évolution de la cause féminine dans les oeuvres d’Anne-Lise Grobéty et Rose-Marie Pagnard, des années 1970 à aujourd’hui (2022)

Jeanneret, Sylvie ; Bernasconi, Camille

Family relations and women’s destinies are two recurrent themes in the novels of two prominent figures of the French-speaking Swiss literature, Anne-Lise Grobéty (1949–2010) and Rose-Marie Pagnard (1943–). Although depicting different universes, more politicized in the first and more poetic in the second, a cross-reading of their works allows to observe a similarity in the treatment of the evolution of the feminine cause within the family unit. Two novels from the 1970–1990 period, «Pour mourir en février» (1970) by Grobéty and «La Leçon de Judith» (1993) by Pagnard, attest to the young girl’s difficulty in building her own identity within her family. The female friendship is presented in both works as a prerequisite for the personal fulfilment of female figures. However, it is rejected by the family who perceives it as a threat to the established patriarchal order. On the other hand, filiation novels of the 2000’s, «La Corde de mi» (2006) by Grobéty and «J’aime ce qui vacille» (2018) by Pagnard, reveal an appeasement of the relations between the young girl and her family, in particular the father figure. The sorority is accepted and even recognised as an aid to the reconstruction of the family bond.

Steckt unsere Gesellschaft in Familiengeschichten von heute? (2022)

Sandberg, Beatrice

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.

Die ambivalente Unergründlichkeit von Familie. Ein Beitrag zum transdisziplinären Diskurs in wissenssoziologischer Perspektive (2022)

Lüscher, Kurt

The particular relevance of family in human life and experience, which is addressed in family novels, is also evident in sociological studies. In what way can these views complement each other? The text is meant as a contribution to discuss this question, starting by presenting some statistical data on the contemporary diversity of individual and collective family behaviors. They are summarized in five theses focusing on an elaborated, open understanding of human generativity, i.e. the individual and the institutional shaping of generational relationships. These generalizations allow to build a bridge to studies on the family novel. I postulate that the commonalities of family sociology and family novel can be seen in the critical dealing with notions of normality, the tense shaping of social relationships, and – consequentially – the dynamic search for personal and collective identities. These processes go hand in hand with experiences of ambivalence and practices to cope with them.

Einblicke in die Entwicklungen im Familienrecht (2022)

Kilde, Gisela

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.

Les familles dans la littérature suisse: miroir de la société actuelle? Introduction (2022)

Eder, Emily ; Jeanneret, Sylvie ; Müller, Ralph

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 multi-lingual corpus, opening up a new view of the relationship between social precon-ditions and literary reflection.

Spiegel der Gesellschaft von heute? Eine Einleitung zu Familien in der Schweizer Literatur (2022)

Eder, Emily ; Jeanneret, Sylvie ; Müller, Ralph

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.

Internationale Zeitschrift für Kulturkomparatistik Bd. 9 (2022): Spiegel der Gesellschaft von heute? Familien in der Schweizer Literatur. Les familles dans la littérature suisse: miroir de la société actuelle? (2022)

Familiengeschichten sind in den letzten dreißig Jahren besonders unter politisch-historischen Aspekten sowie mit einem erinnerungskulturellen Interesse untersucht worden (insbesondere in Deutschland und Österreich, aber auch in Frankreich). Obwohl die Schweiz in die Zivilisationsbrüche des Zweiten Weltkriegs lediglich verwickelt worden ist, ohne von den Auswirkungen in einem vergleichbaren Ausmaß betroffen zu sein wie ihre Nachbarländer, ist der erinnerungskulturelle Diskurs ebenso relevant für schweizerische Literatur. Im vorliegenden Band stellt sich zunächst die Frage, inwiefern die Modelle, die die Forschung zu Familienroman und Generationenerzählung in anderen Literaturen ermittelt hat, auch für die Literaturen der Schweiz gelten. Dabei eröffnet die Untersuchung eines mehrsprachigen Korpus von deutsch-, französisch-, aber auch italienischsprachigen Erzählungen aus der Schweiz ein Untersuchungsfeld, in dem unterschiedliche literarische Traditionen in eine gemeinsame nationalstaatliche Perspektive gestellt werden. Konkret untersuchen die Beiträge im vorliegenden Band, wie Familiengeschichten im Spektrum der schweizerischen Literaturen erzählt werden. Dabei steht die Frage im Raum, ob die Schweizer Gegenwartsliteratur im Hinblick auf die erzählten Familienstrukturen einen Spiegel oder vielleicht einen Zerrspiegel der Schweizer Gesellschaft ergibt.

„Trauerspiel“. Die Schuld im Spiel. Spiel, Souveränität, Schuld, Einfühlung im Lichte Benjamins (2022)

Palma, Massimo

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.

Historisierung. Trauer- und Traumarbeit im Belcanto. Die Stuttgarter Inszenierungen von Vincenzo Bellinis Opern (2022)

Heeg, Günther

Brecht equated the practice of historicizing with that of alienating. According to him, the process of historicizing is about letting the present become so alien through the relationship to another time and history that traits, structures, and patterns become visible that would otherwise no longer be perceived in everyday life. For this to succeed, according to Brecht, the present itself must appear historical and temporarally fixed. However, most historical theater productions seem to be far away from this practice of historicization. History has been driven out of its own emotional images in the practice of theatrical historicism. Instead, they create the appearance of ‘vitalization’ and the ‘resurrection’ of history from the dead. Charged as a substitute for religion, these monumental historical images serve as a basis for legitimizing a world disenchanted by metaphysics. Bellini’s operas can become very interesting from this point of view. They not only appear strange in the present but they challenge it by placing it in a strange light. The historical locations of Bellini’s operas are anticipated in the sense of Brecht. These rooms do not evoke distant times but a past that extends into our time and thus refers to the future past of our present. The historical times in “Norma,” “La Sonnambula,” and “I Puritani” are times of transition. Bellini must have experienced various interim periods – between foreign rule and national liberation, between absolutism and democratic participation, between late feudal order and unbridled capitalism – as times of great and fundamental uncertainty. He historicized this experience in his operas. They expose people’s feelings and actions in the space of a pure in-between, which no longer has a reliable origin or a fortuitous outcome. Bellini’s protagonists are exposed to a transitional existence that is held in perpetual suspension.

Theater (und Kunst) als „Ausstellung“. Ein langer Abschied vom Kultus (2022)

Massalongo, Milena

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.

Vom Drama zum Skript (2022)

Müller-Schöll, Nikolaus

Since Susanne Kennedy appeared with her first production in German spoken theater in 2013, she has disturbed and thrilled the audience with her team: her works established a theater that practically dismisses the idea of a universal, generalizable human being. Not only did Kennedy write a significant piece of the latest theater history, but her work also looks back and sheds a light on the entire history of theater, making us perceive it in a different way. It illustrates a paradigm shift that can be reduced to the formula: from drama to script. At the same time, and in connection with this aspect of her work, her theater project suggests the attempt at a different archeology of the present, taking a step aside from all previous theater historiography and looking at a whole tradition of resistance by the women of theater, to which she is productively linked. Such is the case, for example, of Marieluise Fleißer, whose text „Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt“(Purgatory in Ingolstadt), first appeared on stage after having been renamed, directed, sponsored, curated, edited, and staged by men. On the other hand, with Fleißer’s entry into dramatic poetry, one can observe a transition to a practice of writing and staging that is no longer based on the idealized assumption that one is dealing with the text of a lonely, ingenious author. Rather, the drama is replaced by a polyphonic script that can be recognized from the very beginning. From Fleißer and Gertrude Stein to Ginka Steinwachs, Elfriede Jelinek, and Sarah Kane, this other form of writing will be transferred into a practice of piece-writing that is far away from the male-dominated dramatic production.

Der moderne Zuschauer: Genealogie und Kritik (2022)

Fiorentino, Francesco

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.

Spektakel: Plädoyer für die Revision eines umstrittenen Begriffs (2022)

Röttger, Kati

How do (new) communication and information technologies contribute to the development and maintenance of modern, democratic societies? Do they promote emancipation, enlightenment, and autonomy or do they lock us hermetically into the sparkling world of images and consumption, so that we are guided by false promises and pseudo-needs? Current questions like these make it necessary to revise the concept of spectacle. This term, originally coined by Debord, has again become the focus of cultural-critical debates with the increasing power of new social media. Debord raised the spectacle to a theoretical perspective by describing it as a “society’s worldview that is transferred into the material.” On the other hand, it is precisely this totalizing claim of Debord’s concept of spectacle that is now coming under increasing pressure. Facing this problem, Juliane Rebentisch (2007) suggests suspending the concept of spectacle, as hardly any other concept has been received so unscathed and uncritically of late. I will make a plea for a long overdue revision of the term from the perspective of theater studies. With a few exceptions, the fact that the spectacle itself already has a long (pre-Debordian) history is generally not taken into account. The scope of the spectacle cannot be understood merely within the confines of Debord’s totalizing concept; moreover, it turns out to be an extremely heterogeneous and promising field of investigation, which is far from being sufficiently explored. Here, I would like to stress a potential implementation of the spectacle that, in theater theory, is traditionally placed in opposition to its role in socio-political engagement. The critical potential of the spectacle can only be opened up when the technical conditionality of the spectacle is directly related to the technical conditionality of modernity. This aspect has so far been largely ignored in the critical debates around this concept.

Vorwort (2022)

Fiorentino, Francesco ; Massalongo, Milena

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.

Internationale Zeitschrift für Kulturkomparatistik Bd. 8 (2022): Theaterbegriffe (2022)

Begriffe sind keineswegs Abbildungen von adäquat zu beschreibenden Gegenständen, sondern eher Werkzeuge, anhand derer wir uns in der Wirklichkeit mehr oder weniger wirksam ständig orientieren. Dieses gilt nicht nur für das theoretische Denken: auch im Alltag oder in der Kunstpraxis entkommt man Begriffen nicht. Ein unentbehrliches künstlerisch-kritisches Moment besteht darin, den periodisch entstehenden „Haftungsverlust“ von Begriffen zu überwinden und ihre „Greifkraft“ wiederzugewinnen. In diese Richtung arbeiten die Beiträge dieses Heftes. In Auseinandersetzung mit der sich wandelnden Realität des Theaters entwickeln sie etablierte Begriffe weiter oder loten das kritische Potenzial relativ neuer Begriffe aus, die auch außerhalb des Theaters nützlich sein könnten. Insgesamt dokumentieren sie den Versuch, nicht nur über das Theater nachzudenken, sondern auch mit Hilfe des Theaters zu denken.

Liebe als Naturmystik. Postmetaphysische und postkritische Potenziale bei Henri Bergson und Thomas Rentsch (2022)

Thomas, Philipp

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).

Die Frage nach der adäquaten Naturerkenntnis bei Immanuel Hermann Fichte (2022)

Hernández Maturana, Cristián

The present article addresses the question of the adequate knowledge of nature in the context of Immanuel Hermann Fichte’s philosophy of nature. After an examination of the position and role that this systematic problem has both in Karl Joël’s book Der Ursprung der Naturphilosophie aus dem Geiste der Mystik and in contemporary research on the Anthropocene, this article offers a depiction of Fichte’s conception of the aposterioric speculative mode of knowledge of nature. Finally, Fichte’s conception of knowledge of nature is brought up for discussion both with Joël’s epistemological thesis and with certain approaches of contemporary research on the Anthropocene. It is shown that Fichte’s philosophy offers a productive perspective to addressing contemporary problems of the Anthropocene.

Naturphilosophie und Wandlung der Seele bei Karl Joël und F.W.J. Schelling (2022)

Hueck, Johanna

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.

Leonardo da Vinci und die Geburt der Naturphilosophie in der Renaissance. Eine Reise durch Bilder (2022)

Cuozzo, Gianluca

The “sfumato” is a new notion, both from an artistic and metaphysical viewpoint. Thanks to this concept, Leonardo brings the reflection on the nature of the cosmos to a level of surprising currency, thus overcoming the dichotomy between the human and the natural world (animals, plants, atmosphere, water, and rock formations). At the same time, the distinction between nature and supernatural reality is also questioned: nature is pervaded by the spirit, i.e., the incorporeal force that animates the entire universe, while the sacred turns out to be rooted in an original dimension that escapes any temporal computation. And it is to this union that such magnificent works such as The Virgin of the Rocks, the Mona Lisa, and Saint Anne with the Virgin and Child are inspired. They are pictorial treatises on the philosophy of nature that are inspired to the divine principle, which pervades creation. At the heart of this deep osmosis between natural exploration and the human-divine world is creativity of the artist, in whose works the world is spiritualized and perfected.

Naturphilosophie, Religiöses Empfinden und Lyrik der frühen Antike bei Karl Joël (2022)

Schneider, Wolfgang Christian

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.

Mystik als Ursprung der Naturphilosophie. Zur Relevanz von Joëls Grundthese (2022)

Schwaetzer, Harald

Karl Joël’s book “Der Ursprung der Naturphilosophie aus dem Geiste der Mystik” seems at first glance, like almost all of his writings, as if the author was not very keen on an argumentative course. Yet, the text has been very precisely structured. Its four chapters correspond to the four unities: “It is actually a fourfold unity that they all [i.e. the Renaissance thinkers, HS] teach in the sensed unity of life: the unity of man, of the soul with God [1], the unity of God with the world [2] [...], the unity of the world as such [3], and the unity of man with the world [4]”. From the indifference point of feeling, Joël develops mysticism as the source of knowledge on one side and science as its clear verification on the other side. He bases his concept on an understanding of real spirituality as shown in the ensoulment of the cosmos and in the doctrine of metempsychosis.

Der Geist der Mystik als Ursprung der Naturphilosophie – eine Relektüre Karl Joëls (2022)

Schwaetzer, Harald

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.

Internationale Zeitschrift für Kulturkomparatistik Bd. 7 (2022): Der Geist der Mystik als Ursprung der Naturphilosophie – eine Relektüre Karl Joëls (2022)

Der Band widmet sich dem Ansatz des Basler Philosophen Karl Joël, den dieser unter dem Titel „Der Ursprung der Naturphilosophie aus dem Geiste der Mystik“ 1906 vorgelegt hat. Trotz der geänderten Zeitlage lohnt es sich, so die Überzeugung, aus welcher der vorliegende Band entstanden ist, auf die Quellen hinzudeuten, aus denen Joël geschöpft hat. Wie er selbst nach dem Ursprung der Naturphilosophie fragt, so soll in den Beiträgen dieses Bandes nach dem Ursprung seines eigenen Denkens gefragt werden. Nach einer grundsätzlichen Vorstellung seines Ansatzes (Schwaetzer) werden die drei Epochen in den Blick genommen, auf die Joël vor allem rekurriert: Antike (Schneider), die Renaissance (Cuozzo) und Deutscher Idealismus (Hueck) sowie Spätidealismus (Hernández). Abschließend erfolgt ein Blick von der Gegenwart her (Thomas). Im engeren Sinne situiert sich die Fragestellung des vorliegenden Bandes im Bereich einer Naturphilosophie des Anthropozän. Er diskutiert dabei die These, dass Naturphilosophie aus Mystik entspringt, ohne in ihr aufzugehen, dass die erstere aber auch ihren Ursprung nicht verleugnen darf. Joël bietet damit einen gegenwärtige Konzeptionen produktiv hinterfragenden Wissenschaftsbegriff, der zugleich in eine auch das Geistige in Mensch und Kosmos ernst nehmende Anthropologie eingebettet ist.

Case Study: Galina Rymbu, “Moia vagina,” June 2020 (2022)

von Zitzewitz, Josephine

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.

Feministisches Schreiben und politischer Protest im postsowjetischen Raum (2022)

Schmitt, Angelika

This article examines the interrelation of contemporary Russian feminist poetry and political activism. Recent protest movements in the post-Soviet space demonstrate that female activists play major roles in all aspects of social transformation. While this had not yet become as clear in the case of Russia, a growing movement of young feminist and queer writers are giving voice to the suppressed through poetry. This article investigates this movement by tracing the development of the feminist network assembled around the internet platform “F-pisʼmo,” which has existed since 2017. Through political activism, festivals, creative writing courses, and the online-publication of poetry, prose, and philosophical essays on gender issues, the organizers and participants in the network engage the subaltern in empowering practices in order to undermine and transform the conservative and patriarchal social order of post-Soviet Russia. Analysis of one of the most powerful and controversial poems of this sort, “Moja vagina” (My vagina) by Galina Rymbu, demonstrates the political impact of feminist poetry in Russia and its link to US-American feminist discourse. It is argued that the method of political activism practiced by Russian feminist poets today can be described as speaking and acting through poetry in the sense of Hannah Arendtʼs political theory of the vita activa.

Poetisches Subjekt, Medienperson und politischer Habitus. Poetik und Politik der Provokation in A.A. Vituchnovskajas Leben und Werk im 21. Jahrhundert (2022)

Grübel, Rainer

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.

Медиальность, перформативность и структура текста в поэтической практике Оксаны Васякиной (2022)

Житенев, Александр

This article explores forms of performativity in the poetry of Oksana Vasyakina. Vasyakina considers poetry as part of poetic activism related to the assertion of women’s rights in a patriarchal society. Poetic expression – direct and provocative – responds with aggression to aggression, appropriating a position of power. Violence can only be defeated by finding one’s own voice, for which there is no place in a totally masculine culture. Therefore, Vasyakina’s most important idea is the idea of acquiring authentic speech as a long process that involves both overcoming social stereotypes and overcoming oneself, grounding her poetry in a performativity that is simultaneously pragmatic, thematic, and poetological.

Körper in politischen Kontexten bei einigen deutsch- und russischsprachigen Dichterinnen seit 1980 (2022)

Friedrichs, Ekaterina

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.

The Body Returns: Recent Poems by Russian Women (2022)

Sandler, Stephanie

Russian feminist poetry has flourished in the post-Soviet period, especially the last decade. It has provided inspiring modes of resistance to all forms of indifference to bodily harms, particularly the harms to women. That poetry is studied here through the lens of feminist theory. The essay argues that a wide range of such theories finds resonance in these poems, and it introduces several key poets: Galina Rymbu, Oksana Vasiakina, Lida Yusupova, Elena Fanailova, and Mariia Stepanova, with a coda on Konstantin Shavlovskii.

Русская поэзия 2010-х в поисках солидарности (2022)

Кузьмин, Дмитрий

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.”

Zum Geleit (2022)

Stahl, Henrieke ; Fees, Anna ; Telge, Claus

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 performative 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.

Internationale Zeitschrift für Kulturkomparatistik Bd. 6 (2022): Poetics and Politics by Women in the Post-Soviet Space (2022)

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.

The breathless discourse. Narrating death in Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s “Death on Credit,” Samuel Beckett’s “The Unnamable” and Paul Auster’s “4321” (2022)

Veisland, Jørgen

The article analyzes three modernist novels, Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s “Death on Credit,” Samuel Beckett’s “The Unnamable,” and Paul Auster’s “4321”. The texts examined manifest radical discursive changes that are connected with epistemological and ontological conceptions of mind and being. Modern conceptions of being are seen as being based on the non-concepts of exaiphnes, the timeless instant, as developed by Parmenides, sunyata as defined in Buddhist thought, and the indeterminacy of particles as discovered by quantum physics. The idea of being as a state of infinite potentiality impacts the discourse and the form of the modern novel as it moves in the direction of formlessness, thus mirroring the non-substantiality of the human subject. The narrators of the three novels speak at a breathless pace that punctuates and disrupts the narrative and that inserts death as the agent of the negation of meaning.

On the “Flowing Movement” and the “Lofty and Ancient” in Gary Snyder’s Poetry (2022)

Jun-ping, Zhang ; Wei-hang, Chen

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.

Wallace Stevens: Lyrisch Philosophieren (2022)

Hühn, Peter

Wallace Stevens is widely regarded as an author whose poetry possesses a particularly close affinity to philosophy, which is usually taken to mean that his poems contain statements of philosophical concepts or propositions. In contrast to this, the following article examines the relation of Stevens’s poetry and philosophy with respect not to the contents of his poems but to their sequential structure. This analytic focus is motivated by the observation that the progression of the utterance in a great many of Stevens’s poems appears to be modelled on the principles of philosophical argumentation: i.e., that the poems go through a quasi-philosophical process of questioning, reflection, and cognition. As lyric poems, however, they pursue this practical process of thinking and arguing on the basis of the principles of poetic composition. The poems can thus be described as employing two different discourse types at the same time and in interaction with each other: philosophical argumentation, on the one hand, and poetic composition on the other. Accordingly, the following analyses are guided by two questions: first, what aims do the argumentations in the poems pursue and, second, how do the two discourse types interact with each other in that process? Three poems from different periods of Stevens’s poetic œuvre are used as examples: “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” (1923), “Man Carrying Thing” (1947) and “The Plain Sense of Things” (1954).

„Ein Denkender, den Blumen unterworfen.“ Francis Ponge und die Herausforderung poetischer Reflexion (2022)

Geisler, Eberhard

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.

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