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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

In the face of uncontrollable complexity, the concept of a rational design of the organization is being replaced by the notion of an open future that is inherently unpredictable and unplanable. In rapidly changing environments, organizations and leaders are confronted with a constant stream of irritations and unexpected developments, that require ongoing attention. This prompts the question of whether the conceptualization of digital transformation as a paradigm shift also implies the need for new forms of leadership. The article analyzes the discourse on digital leadership and assesses the extent to which this concept relativizes leadership in the context of the evolution of leadership theory, which is characterized by a persistent process of modification and relativization of preceding concepts. Leadership concepts are not only responsive to general needs, but also vary according to specific contexts, such as non-profit leadership or leadership in social welfare organizations and meta-organizations. Results of a discourse analysis, which underscore the significance of adopting a complexity theory perspective on digital leadership, will therefore be contrasted with the initial findings of an empirical study on digitization in such meta-organizations. This allows for a discussion of the general findings on the revitalization of leadership, which will serve as a paradigmatic example of the previously developed context. The article concludes with implications for further theory development with the aim of making a specific contribution to organization-sensitive digitization research. The findings of the empirical study indicate the significance of employing informal structures and a heightened emphasis on subjectivity within meta-organizations, as opposed to the formal structures of organizations. The concept of digital leadership does not signify the obsolescence of traditional leadership; rather, it can be conceptualized as an advanced form of unheroic leadership within the context of external and internal complexity.