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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.