Nelly Sachs
Description
Nelly Sachs. The Poetics of Silence and the Limits of Representation examines the poetry of the Nobel Prize-winning German Jewish poet Nelly Sachs. It firstly shifts established patterns of reception by analysing the author's reception in East and West Germany after the war and the role she came to play in the Federal Republic as a representative 'Poet of Reconciliation'. The study then situates Sachs' work within the framework of the debate surrounding the representation of the Holocaust by means of a thorough exposition of the aporia at the heart of Theodor Adorno's writings on post-Holocaust art. It demonstrates by close reading how Sachs' work is itself marked by this aporetic struggle and exposes in particular the aesthetic means by which Sachs renders this aporetic tension legible in her poetry through her use of, for example, prosopopoeia, her recasting of traditional metaphors and her reversal of biblical archetypes. The primary question addressed is whether Sachs' poetry, in spite of the fact that it thematises the impossibility of adequate representation, has representational value, or whether her work is bereft of concrete, representational meaning as a result of the often fragmented nature of her writing. In particular, the author confronts those critics who see in Sachs' work elements of consolation, reconciliation, or redemption in a transcendental realm, in favour of a reading that regards her work as permeated with the concrete events of the Holocaust and irreconcilably opposed to any notion of a religious sense-making and redemptive paradigm.
Reviews / Votes
"Sachs' Lyrik der 1940er-Jahre wird zum ersten Mal in Martins Interpretation in ihrer ganzen Radikalität lesbar. Vielleicht sind Sachs' Texte die überzeugendste Darstellung, die wir vom 'Zivilisationsbruch Auschwitz' haben."Florian Strob in: http://www.literaturkritik.de/public/rezension.php?rez_id=16098More details
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Content
2 - Contents [Seite 8]
3 - Introduction [Seite 10]
4 - I Contexts [Seite 16]
4.1 - 1 Nelly Sachs: A Tumultuous Reception History [Seite 18]
4.1.1 - 1.1 West Germany's Three Myths [Seite 18]
4.1.2 - 1.2 Peace with The Perpetrators [Seite 27]
4.1.3 - 1.3 Restoration in the Literary Arena [Seite 33]
4.1.4 - 1.4 Reception in the East [Seite 36]
4.1.5 - 1.5 Reception in the West: "Die Dichterin der Versöhnung" [Seite 42]
4.2 - 2 The Problematics of Holocaust Representation [Seite 58]
4.2.1 - 2.1 Adorno's 'after-Auschwitz' Aporia [Seite 58]
4.2.2 - 2.2 The Expropriation of Death and Adorno's Modernist Critique [Seite 64]
4.2.3 - 2.3 'The Extremity that Eludes the Concept' [Seite 66]
4.2.4 - 2.4 The Failure of Culture [Seite 70]
4.2.5 - 2.5 Adorno's 'Widerruf' [Seite 72]
5 - II Practices [Seite 76]
5.1 - 3 Nelly Sachs' Poetics of Silence: Poetry at the Limits of Representation [Seite 78]
5.1.1 - 3.1 Defying 'Verstummen' [Seite 78]
5.1.2 - 3.2 The Decay of Language [Seite 80]
5.1.3 - 3.3 Addressing the Perpetrators [Seite 92]
5.1.4 - 3.4 Prosopopoeia as a Representational Device [Seite 107]
5.1.5 - 3.5 Sachs' Nacht-Metaphorik: Reversing a Traditional Image [Seite 114]
5.1.6 - 3.6 The Poetics of Disfiguration [Seite 122]
5.1.7 - 3.7 Adorno's Extremity in Sachs' Poetics [Seite 131]
5.1.8 - 3.8 Writing the Inability to Write: Sachs' Self-Reflective Poetics [Seite 134]
5.1.9 - 3.9 'Grabschriften in die Luft': Keeping Memory Open [Seite 140]
5.1.9.1 - 3.9.1 The Open Wound [Seite 146]
5.1.10 - 3.10 The 'Death of Death': 'Die Todentrissenen' [Seite 149]
5.1.11 - 3.11 Archetypes as Representational Devices [Seite 159]
5.1.11.1 - 3.11.1 Sachs' 'Anti-Job' [Seite 161]
5.1.11.2 - 3.11.2 Abraham: Refuting the Martyrdom Thesis [Seite 176]
5.1.11.3 - 3.11.3 Daniel: Interpreter of Nightmares [Seite 188]
6 - Conclusion [Seite 192]
7 - Bibliography [Seite 196]
