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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pastoral serves as a keyword when understanding Seamus Heaney’s literary production, both in terms of stylistic features and imagery. Although critical attention has focused on the connection between his pastoral works and contemporary Irish politics, the growth of ecocritical scholarship in the last few decades has made evident the importance of broadening such an analytical scope to relationships between humans and the environment while studying this genre. In this alignment, the present essay offers an ecocritical reading of some selected pastoral poems by Heaney, with a specific focus on his revival of the eclogue through the collection “Electric Light” (2001). Precisely, the poems “Virgil: Eclogue IX,” “Bann Valley Eclogue,” and “Glanmore Eclogue” will be read through the innovative perspective offered by the recent engagement of affect theory with ecocriticism: by doing so, I argue that Heaney’s poems can be understood as valuable nature narratives that stress the connectedness between the human and the nonhuman, while resonating with the urgencies posed by the current environmental crisis to re-think more ethical forms of relationships between them. Furthermore, through the lens of econarratology, attention will be paid to the ecological potentials expressed by the formal features of the eclogue: this observation considers, on the one hand, the notion of ‘relationality’ within the practice of the shepherds’ dialogue/singing and, on the other hand, how this literary form stresses the attachment between the human and the environment, both in the real world and in the storyworld. Hence, when exceeding a strictly politically oriented critical analysis of his work, Heaney’s eclogues become visible as compelling ecocritical accounts that favor investigating the role of (pastoral) literature in fostering critical discussions about human/nonhuman ethics as a way to respond to the challenges of the Anthropocene.

This paper investigates how and to what extent the literary genre of the idyll lives on as part of the ‘new nature poetry.’ Following a conceptual, historical, and generic classification of the idyll, Thomas Kling’s „geschrebertes idyll, für mike feser“ is read to show, on the one hand, how skillfully and knowledgeably he unpacks the tradition. He not only plays in extenso with the genre’s characteristic features but also, on the other hand, includes in his “allotment garden idyll,” which can be read as an early example of Anthropocene poetry, astute and sharp-tongued ecological, social, medial, and historical critique. Despite his critical sensitivity to socially relevant themes, however, Kling presents a decidedly patriarchal self image, which today’s readers would probably find less readily acceptable and which distinguishes him from the most recent contemporary poetry.

This article will examine how and to what extent the ancient tradition of the didactic poem exerts an influence on contemporary German nature poetry. It will focus in particular on Raoul Schrott’s „Tropen“ and Marion Poschmann’s „Geliehene Landschaften“, which, while different from each other, both offer clues to possible lines of influence. Although there is a long tradition of didascalic poems in the German literature of the Renaissance and of the Enlightenment, my point of reference will be the ancient didactic poem, as it was shaped by Lucretius in his “De rerum natura”, because of its masterful intertwining of knowledge and poetry and its wholly secular view of nature, creation, and evolution, as well as the fact that it stresses the idea that life is accidental. These are the aspects of ancient didactic poetry that I will investigate in the aforementioned German poets and works, with particular attention to the relationship between the knowledge of nature and the language of poetry. Both Schrott and Poschmann openly use the word ‚Lehrgedicht‘ [didactic poem] in order to define their poems, in which the didactic parts function as a knowledge of “nature after nature.” As a consequence, their poetry revolves around the impossibility of an all-encompassing explanation of the world and takes as its theme the rupture that divides human beings from nature in the modern age. Consciousness of the intrinsic constructedness of the way we experience nature is, on the other hand, a condition for both its aesthetic perception and scientific enquiry. At the center of both Schrott’s and Poschmann’s poetry collections, albeit in different ways and with different emphases, we thereby find an understanding of nature as a void that can only be approached (but never overcome) by means of language. Herein lies the main difference between these contemporary poets and the ancient tradition.

This essay puts forth a definition of poetry rooted in experience. In following Eugenio Montale, it analyzes two of his poems – “I limoni” and “Notizie dall’Amiata” – to show how the poet, rather than constructing discrete poetic worlds, aims at a poetry revealing the world and nature to a concrete reader, unforeseeable for the poet. Poetry thus aims at imbuing this reader’s life with an ephemeral poetic form, rather than evoking its own self-sufficient aesthetics. In doing so, chance and flaws in the social and cultural construction of reality act as co-authors of his “poesia”.

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

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

The concept of art is a lens through which one can explore the thought of Nicho las of Cusa. He uses this notion throughout his work in order to address the pro ductive dynamism of the divine mind as well as the human mind. With a focus on the human arts as likenesses of the divine art, this paper studies the relationship between the art of the word and the illiterate manual arts. Firstly, we examine the ars coniecturalis as a human art form that Cusanus presents for the first time in extenso in “De coniecturis”. Secondly, we address the power of the art of the word through the production of its most precious form, the spoken word. Thirdly, and finally, we inquire into the power of the manual arts through the example of the idiota’s making of wooden spoons in the “De mente” in order to show the relationship between this art and the art of the word.

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

This paper explores the presence of the poetic word in contemporary urban settings: from “Poetry in Motion,” displayed in the New York City subway at the very place where one usually finds ads, to fluid xenon light projections of huge verse on the exterior of buildings in Basel or Zurich by visual artist Jenny Holzer, who presents poems of the Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska together with her own short “Truisms.” Or from single poems permanently written on walls – e.g. a much-discussed concrete poem by Eugen Gomringer at the facade of a Berlin college of education – to the technically enhanced spoken word, audible from far away as a side effect of gigantic poetry slam events in stadiums, e.g. the Trabrennbahn (race-course) in Hamburg and even performative events such as Ulrike Almut Sandig’s „augenpost“ in which poems are ‘published’ on posters, flyers and free postcards in the urban space of Leipzig or declaimed on public squares in Indian metropolises through a megaphone. Such presentations of poetry in urban space are still uncommon, thus creating an aesthetic experience that differs strongly from reception in private settings or even in readings or public poetry festivals, as the poem relates to its urban surroundings.

In this article, I analyze the most recent Russian video poetry as an amplification and semantic enrichment of the classic literature paradigm. My thesis is that new visual poetry produces a subtle, polysemous – but at the same time striking – political message within a synthetic artistic framework. I show how recent Russian social (also to be called political) poetry is developing what I call the aesthetics of environmental non-division. I focus on the art collective “The Group of Esfir’ Shub,” which was founded in 2017 by the artist and designer Polina Zaslavskaia. The group’s synthetic method of working with poems generates a “tropic connection between the text and the video,” which correlates or even confronts direct and figurative sign meanings of different media with each other. “Esfir’ Shub” emphasizes one of the essential features of new social poetry ‒ the problematization of corporeality as a phenomenon belonging to organic, living material, which affects the very character of subjectivity. The project “Esfir’ Shub” is situated on the border between visual eco-art and social poetry. What is more important, it represents new trends in Russian engaged aesthetics, which I call biopoetics ‒ a notion which has been intensely discussed in the last two decades.

This essay identifies a shared response to news media in poetry written over the past three decades by writers working in Chinese, Russian, and English. These poets often directly incorporate texts and images from news media into their work. Some scholars have argued that this tendency towards the collaging of texts derived from news and social media reflects a shift in poetic subjectivity. However, when seen from a comparative perspective, these and other cut-ups of news and social media are better understood as, on the one hand, an extension of a much longer tradition of literary and artistic responses to the news and, on the other, a renewal of that tradition in response to the intensification of the intertwined pressures of new media and globalization since the end of the Cold War and the rise of the Internet. The article identifies this shared response to media and globalization among a variety of examples in Chinese, Russian, and English, including Kirill Medvedev’s «Текст, посвященный трагическим событиям 11 сентября в Нью-Йорке» (“Text Devoted to the Tragic Events of September 11 in New York”); Stanislav Lvovsky’s «Чужими словами» (“In Other Words”); Dmitri Prigov’s «По материалам прессы» (“Based on Material from the Press”) and “ru.sofob (50 x 50)”; Lin Yaode’s 林燿德 “Er erba” 《二二八》(“February 28”), Hsia Yü 夏宇 and her collaborators’ group project “Huadiao huadiao huadiao” 《劃掉劃掉劃掉》 (“Cross It Out, Cross It Out, Cross It Out”), Yan Jun’s 顏峻 2003 multi-media video performance “Fan dui yiqie you zuzhi de qipian” 《反对一切有组织的欺骗》 (“Against All Organized Deception”); online video poetry produced in response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake; and Brian Kim Stefans’s mashup of “New York Times” articles with texts from the Situationist International. On the one hand, these texts operate between various media and art forms: between poetry and contemporary art, music, journalism, and social media, between the print newspaper and digital file, between the webpage and live performance, and between image and text. But on the other hand, and inextricably, they also operate within global information networks. They are better understood as addressing not the transformation of the poetic subject but the undoing of the boundaries of poetry and of the concept of a nationally defined literature.

The article offers a preliminary investigation of the phenomenon of female-authored ‘poetry theater’ (shige juchang)1 in the People’s Republic of China. It discusses cross-genre explorations by a group of female poets, theater directors and artists who are all associated with the movement of ‘women’s poetry’ (nüxing shige) that emerged in the 1980s in China. The discussion focuses on two performances based on female-authored poems, “Riding a Roller Coaster Flying Toward the Future” (2011) and “Roaming the Fuchun Mountains with Huang Gongwang” (2016), which resulted from the joint efforts of four women: the poet Zhai Yongming, the poet-scholar Zhou Zan, and the theater directors Cao Kefei and Chen Si’an. Their avant-garde experiments with poetical theater document the different ways in which poetry is being translated into images, sounds, or bodily movements on stage. The paper argues that poetic exploration of writing and reciting practices has gained new momentum from emerging intermedial, visual-verbal experiments. Furthermore, it claims that interest in ‘poetry theater’ is also driven by the search for new forms of cross-genre stage performances that could be different from the previously politicized or commercialized ones.

The following contribution seeks to understand poetry as a genre situated between written text and performance. First, it presents instances of the systematic differences between performed and written poems, defining ‘performed poetry’ in a decidedly broad sense. The metaphor of ‘aggregate states’ is tested and critically discussed in order to describe poetry as a genre that not only is received in a state of exception but that in its very essence plays between substantially different media and forms. Due to the dearth of critical work addressing poetry as a performative art, a set of terms and tools for the analysis of performed poetry is proposed. After these brief theoretical remarks, two poems are examined, both of which are accessible as performance and as a written text. Their differences are considered in order to show the potential value of separating and comparing performative and written elements for individual analysis as well as for further conceptual discussion. Nora Gomringer’s „Dichtertreffen“ is presented by the author in the style of a classical reading (‚Wasserglaslesung‘), in which the artist, however, utilizes a full repertoire of performative channels and codes. As a result, the semantics of this performed variant differ significantly from those of the written text. The use of the body, objects, space, and voice alter the meaning of the poem even in a reading that, at first glance, does not conspicuously refer to performative art forms at all. Martina Hefter’s poem about the physical condition of lying („liegen“) focuses on the dance-like handling of body and space in its performed version, which has little in common with a classical reading. The discussion of two poems, written and performed, reveals the importance of considering both ‘aggregate states’ of the poem when working with texts and engaging in the recent debates of lyricology

This contribution analyses two complex examples of the generic extension of lyric poetry in recent British literature. Tony Harrison’s film poem “The Shadow of Hiroshima” (1995) expands the lyric text into the visual dimension; Glyn Maxwell’s collection “The Sugar Mile” (2005) arranges a large number of individual lyric poems into a dramatic scenario. In both cases the generic transition is coupled with a further generic extension – the elaboration of a distinctly narrative sequentiality. In two important aspects the generic extension of these examples affects the rendering of a particular experience, namely the perception of and reaction to massive violence and destruction. One aspect concerns the organization of speech situation and perspective, especially the relation between a superordinate authorial voice and possible subordinate voices, the other aspect pertains to the status of the represented experience in the ambiguity between factuality and fictionality, characteristic of the stance of the lyric utterance in various periods throughout the history of poetry. In both respects the generic expansion in Harrison’s “The Shadow of Hiroshima” and in Maxwell‘s “The Sugar Mile” can be shown to utilize the representational potentials of lyric poetry in distinctly alternative directions.

This contribution examines the question of how contemporary lyric poetry expands upon established generic concepts by considering the work of Monika Rinck, one of the most striking voices among a generation of exceedingly talented poets who made their debut in the 2000s. In her poetry, we find numerous examples of how the expectations of lyric are deliberately undermined: among them, formal features reminiscent of prose, such as her tendency to use extremely long lines and prose-typical abbreviations, as well as her explicit interest in the discursive exploration of ‘concepts.’ As her essays suggest, this interest manifests itself most readily in Rinck’s efforts to avoid the totalizing economization of society (as well as art and language) and has, as a result, motivated the development of her own style within experimental language poetry. However, while Rinck has played a leading role in expanding the contemporary concept of poetry, the poetic principles to which she refers in her theoretical writings and poems are by no means new. In this article, her poem „Augenfühlerfisch“ (“eye-tentacle fish”) serves not only to illustrate her tendency to expand poetry into discursive prose but demonstrates how it is rooted in a long-standing philosophical tradition. The terminology used in the poem can be traced back to early modern epistemology and particularly to the foundation of scientific aesthetics by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. In referring to Baumgarten’s definition of poetry as “fully sensuous speech” [„vollkommen sinnliche Rede“] (as well as the specific deployment of this definition by Johann Adolf Schlegel), it becomes clear that Rinck reactivates an epistemological potential in lyric that had been hidden by the paradigm of Erlebnislyrik [experiential lyric]. Moreover, Rinck is able to relax the Erlebnislyrik’s pretense to sincerity in part thanks to the same prose features, such as the multiplication of voices, already mentioned above.

This article asks what “world lyric in transition” could mean to literary scholarship by clarifying the terms “lyric,” “world lyric,” and “transition.”

According to the “Ältestes Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus” philosophy resolves itself into poetics at the end. Hölderlin elaborates this idea in his poetic fragments. The article describes the systematic impact of Hölderlin’s concept of „Wechsel der Töne“ on the act of composing poems. On the example of the seven keywords of an unwritten poem „Ovids Rükkehr nach Rom“, the article focusses on a specific metamorphosis: the one from a pure intellectual and pre-lingual realm into the lingual sphere of a concrete poem. Thereby it becomes clear that the way of thinking (in its pre-lingual sense) is poetic; the process of thinking transforms itself into a genuine poetic progress, and vice versa the structure of a poem turns out to be part of a creative development of thinking. By contrast, the described transformative process elucidates an impact of contemporary poetics, because transformation as a core issue is mostly only referred to linguistic, social, or cultural aspects.

This paper characterizes several ways of transferring knowledge via lyric poetry. It is argued that conveying information via schemata is a prevalent mode of that kind. But there are also others like employing a concise use of language or pointing at other texts using intertextual references. Besides, many poetry books establish some sort of a lyric sequence to further elaborate a certain topic. As information in lyric poetry is not only schematized, but also sketchy, from a critical reception point of view it may also be highlighted that recipients can make use of it as some kind of a template that enables them to gain new insights related to their own living environment. The important role of schemata as well as the other kinds of knowledge transfer specified in this paper are exemplified with reference to the contemporary poetry of ageing and with a special focus on several poems by Harald Hartung. As ageing is a process that becomes more and more important to western societies due to demographic development, the poetry of ageing and of old age in particular may serve as a tool for gaining knowledge and especially knowledge of what-it-is-like regarding that topic. This adds even more authority to the question of how knowledge is transferred via literature and lyric poetry in particular.

The paper gives a survey on the German tradition of didactic poems and nature poems from the 18 th century to the immediate present. The early modern pattern of nature as a peaceful Arcadia, the enlightenment pattern of nature reflecting God in every detail, and the romanticist pattern of nature that is impenetrable but nevertheless a permanent object of longing (“Sehnsucht”) are proved to be models of nature poetry that are the most important reference points up to now. The poems about nature written in the early 21st century refer to these models as well as to their destruction and deconstruction by the modernists and avantgardes of the 20th century. The most convincing poets devoting their attention to nature today play with these traditions with artistic perfection and in an ironic manner at the same time. Often, annotations, essays, and talks on nature are accompanying the lyrical texts. In the present, female writers are the authors of some of the best poems about nature. In several poems, the relationship between love and nature appears under new perspectives. Other important subjects are the landscapes of far-away countries.

Literature and thus also historical poetry want “not only to convey factual truth and to exhort subjective truthfulness, but also to give orientation for the – in whatever respect – correct or appropriate world behavior” (Lamping 2013: 65f.). The question of this paper is to what extent and how the 9/11-poems of Thomas Kling and Durs Grünbein offer a specific counter-historiography beyond the dichotomies of truth and falsehood, fact and fiction, in order to achieve a different level of knowledge. Due to the exhibited self-relatedness Grünbein presents not only in his essayistic pretext but also in his poem „September-Elegien“ mainly a subjective truthfulness rather than any certain orientation-knowledge. Kling’s historiographical-wrapped and complex instrumented poem „Manhattan Mundraum Zwei“ offers over-temporal, metaphysical-existential (counter-)truths and gives orientation beyond media-presented “facts” about 9/11.

This article analyses the depiction of school as a place of knowledge in contemporary poetry in English. In dealing with the poetry of Jean Breeze (Jamaica/GB), Gillian Clarke (Wales/GB), Carol Ann Duffy (England/GB), Thabo Jijana (South Africa), Meena Kandasamy (Tamil Nadu/India), Claudia Rankine (USA) and Edwin Thumboo (Singapore), it does not only enable the reader to draw pedagogical conclusions from poetic evidence. The article differentiates further between a poem’s potential of knowledge and its process of knowledge developed during its reception; taking, additionally, into account how its reception might interfere with the poem’s potential of knowledge and even with its author’s intention. Eventually, each poem highlights an important anglophone region ranging from the United States, the Caribbean, India and South Africa to the British Isles and Singapore. Hence, each poem is also interpreted in its cultural and historical context. Last but not least, the article tries to undertake a comparative analysis of the role of contemporary German-language poetry within educational contexts in Germany.

Walter Benjamin developed his concept of the “aura” on the basis of the poetry of Baudelaire and applied this term to objects of art, nature, and man. Georg Picht transformed Benjamin’s aura-concept into a method of pre-rational knowledge forms, whose mediums includes foremost music, but also poetry and art. In modern nature poetry the varieties of aura cognition can be determined and described with the help of Benjamin’s and Picht’s concepts: Gennadij Ajgi creates poetic equivalents for the experience of nature-aura; Keijiro Suga makes a diagnosis of aura of areas of natural sites or landscapes and their historical transformation through war and nuclear catastrophe (Fukushima); Christian Lehnert translates auratic communication with nature in poetic conversations.

On account of its constitution as a temporally organized sequence of verbal utterances, typically presented from a speaker’s subjective perspective, lyric poetry is particularly suited to simulate mental processes and thereby mediate forms of cognition and insight. Indeed, the presentation of cognitive phenomena can be considered one of the prime functions of lyric poems throughout the history of poetry. For the analysis of such processes in poems a transgeneric narratological approach is here proposed, which is ultimately based on the anthropological fact that human existence is inescapably subject to temporality and change and that individuals are therefore permanently concerned with understanding, structuring, planning or preventing change. For this purpose, they employ the basic operation of narration in their communication both with others and themselves as well as in the production and reception of the various artistic genres, not only in fiction, drama and film, but also in lyric poetry. Poems employ narrative elements in a variety of modes which are specific to poetry, such as psycho-narration, mini-narratives, condensed, implicit or metaphorical narratives. A central device for structuring and interpreting a narrative sequence is the event, a transformation or decisive turn in the chain of changes, which then constitutes the moment of cognition or insight in the poem. The presentation of such a mental transformation from the speaker’s limited subjective perspective allows for a critical assessment of status and motivation of the process of cognition on the part of the reader. This transgeneric narratological approach to the cognitive dimension of lyric poetry will first be demonstrated with the analysis of an older prototypical example, W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”, and then applied to three recent, complex British-Irish poems, Eavan Boland’s “The Making of an Irish Goddess”, Kathleen Jamie’s “The Way We Live” and Paul Muldoon’s “Why Brownlee Left”, exemplifying the range of variation in which lyric poetry can perform and mediate mental processes of cognition.

The problem of this volume is not so much ‚Lyrik‘ but rather ‚Erkenntnis‘ (knowledge, cognition). This paper, therefore, discusses a revision of the notion of ‚erkennen‘ (knowing, realizing, understanding), explaining it as a way of transforming our way of thinking things at the same time as understanding ourselves and other cognizant beings. In this way, the notion of knowledge / understanding is to be freed from the narrow restrictions of science, by which most of us have acquired the habit of limiting understanding to specific scientific methods. Beyond the bounds of established scientific standards, the practice of philosophical thinking reveals analogies to the practice of lyrical thinking. Both try to explore new ways of thinking beyond the limits of established methodological guidelines. Which characteristics do they share, which differences remain? But most of all, how can these nonscientific ways of searching for knowledge be protected from confusion and disorientation? How may their ways of thinking be legitimized? Where do they lead? A major thesis of the paper argues that both ways of searching for knowledge, poetry and philosophy, question the generally accepted distinction of analytical and synthetic judgements. This distinction is a constitutive element of any scientific discourse manifesting itself in the importance of the introductory definitions of its specific basic terms. They start from the common experience that seemingly evident words and notions, by being used in unaccustomed ways, may change their meanings, i.e. their relations to other words and notions. Both in their own traditions, experimental practices of thinking poetry as well as philosophy, may succeed in opening up new ways of perceiving of things as well as realizing the thinkers’ own position in the world while attempting to convince others to join them in doing so.

The relation between poetry and cognition has seldom been discussed theoretically due to the assumption that poetry has more to do with emotion than with cognition. The following article attempts to survey this field. It distinguishes between three types of cognition in poetry referring mostly to European and American poems of the 20th century: cognition that is caused by poems, cognition that is imparted in poems, and cognition that is formed in poems.

”Poetry and Cognition“ is a topic which could be regarded as paradigmatic for the objective of this journal: Exploring a phenomenon which primarily discloses itself to a transdisciplinary and polyperspectivic approach, extending across research areas defined by disciplines and subjects. The question of knowledge gained by and within poetry neither exclusively falls within the scope of a genuinely literary, philological or even lyricological research area, nor does it entirely belong into various fields of philosophy, such as aesthetics or epistemology, but requires for its discussion both, an approach from the perspective of specialised academic research on poetry as well as from an epistemological point of view.

The present study investigates the prosody of information-seeking (ISQs) and rhetorical questions (RQs) in Standard Chinese, in polar and wh-questions. Like in other languages, ISQs and RQs in Standard Chinese can have the same surface structure, allowing for a direct prosodic comparison between illocution types (ISQ vs RQ). Since Standard Chinese has lexical tone, the use of f0 as a cue to illocution type may be restricted. We investigate the prosodic differences between ISQs and RQs as well as the interplay of prosodic cues to RQs. In terms of f0, results showed that RQs were lower in f0, with the f0 range on the first word being expanded followed by f0 compression. RQs were further longer in duration and more often realized with non-modal voice quality (glottalized voice) as compared to ISQs. These prosodic cues were largely manipulated in tandem (illocutionary pairs with larger durational differences also showed larger differences in mean f0; voice quality, in turn, seemed to be an additional cue). We suggest three possible explanations (assertive force, focus, speaker attitude) that unite the present findings on RQs in Standard Chinese with the findings on RQs in other, non-tonal languages.