This essay investigates the political and strategic deployment of somatic vocabulary in Ulrike Me... more This essay investigates the political and strategic deployment of somatic vocabulary in Ulrike Meinhof's letter/poem which she wrote while incarcerated in solitary confinement in Köln-Ossendorf Prison in 1972. It links the bodily dissociation described in the poem with the breakdown of syntax, identity, and self-perception. Meinhof's poem brings the fragmented body into language-a language of repetitions, syntactic disruptions, parataxis, fragmentation, linguistic disorientation, and violent disassociation. The physical and psychic pain experienced in isolation and the imagery of the suffering body conjured up in the poem, suggest-especially to a German postwar audience-haunting associations with the Holocaust and the National Socialist treatment of unwanted persons and prisoners.
Reife und Alter verlaufen parallel zu den gesellschaftlichen Rollen als Tochter Mutter und Witwe ... more Reife und Alter verlaufen parallel zu den gesellschaftlichen Rollen als Tochter Mutter und Witwe und zu drei Existenzweisen, denen zu entgehen in der Erzäh¬ lung keine Frau imstande zu sein scheint Prostitution beziehungsweise die Einset¬ zung des Korpers als Tauschobjekt in jungen Jahren werden gefolgt von Ehe und schließlich der geistigen Umnachtung der mannerlosen Frauen Die Übergänge sind dabei fließend, d h es gibt Überschneidungen zwischen Prostitution und Ehe und der Zustand der geistigen Umnachtung tntt, z B bei einer jungen Witwe schon in einer früheren Lebensphase ein
Cities have long challenged, captivated, and inspired the cultural imagination of their inhabitan... more Cities have long challenged, captivated, and inspired the cultural imagination of their inhabitants and non-inhabitants alike. In contemporary society, urban areas seem to gain importance in every imaginable way and are recognized as privileged sites that engender, enable, and nourish creative endeavours, multicultural environments, economic mobility, and innovative responses to the challenges posed by capitalism and globalization. However, these urban narratives of ambition and creation are often undercut by material realities and ethnic, religious, and social tensions and are shot through with a myriad of thwarted aspirations. Gentrification leaves its marks on city demographics as it dramatically reconfigures urban landscapes and populations, pushing to the geographical margins those who are already restricted socially and culturally. Impinging on and deeply enmeshed with potent material realities are the political and cultural histories that haunt cites and forge their unique identities. This issue of Seminar focuses on the New Berlin as created through various cultural productions and gestures to the contemporary importance of the rising global culture of creative forms of dissent through the occupation of urban physical and ideational space. One of the economic and cultural powerhouses of Europe, Berlin also holds a unique place in the shaping of historical and contemporary images of Germany and Germanness. The historical, cultural, and geographical peculiarities of the German capital-"its delayed jump-start into the world-city ranks of Imperial and Weimar modernity, and its subsequent near-fatal marring by Nazi planning, wartime bombing, Cold War division, and now post-Wall reclamation and reinventionare the reason why the identity of this city remains so disjointed" (Ward 5). However, it is precisely this "disjointedness" and the lack of a fixed identity that allowed Berlin "to host one of the most dramatic processes of urban reinvention" (6). Since the fall of the Wall in 1989 and the concomitant shift in global relations of power, the renewed German capital has been the site of intense social, political, and cultural transformations. Although the "voids of Berlin" (Huyssen) have mostly been filled, there remain today seemingly unoccupied spaces of memory and possibility that titillate the imagination. Unlike other crowded, tradition-bound cities of western Europe, this newly loosened and less than completely capitalized and revitalized urban
Ten years on from the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature and thirty years after German reunif... more Ten years on from the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature and thirty years after German reunification and the fall of the Ceauşescu regime in Romania is a fitting moment to revisit Herta Müller's work and place it within broader intellectual, geographical, and historical horizons than has hitherto been attempted. It is also time to reconcile the public intellectual with the literary author. For it has long been clear that Müller's aesthetically innovative and highly acclaimed novels, essays, and collages stand as a testament to the major upheavals of twentieth-century European history. Drawing on her Romanian-German upbringing, overshadowed by the Second World War and Stalin-era deportations, and on her adult negotiation of the oppression of Romanian Communism and the shock of arrival in 1980s West Berlin, Müller has created a body of work which thematises guilt, trauma, alienation, flight, and resistance. Her works concern themselves with the experiences of common people-often at the margins of society or excluded from the narratives of ypolitical history yet caught up in historical currents-and promote awareness of the huge cost in terms of suffering and upheaval paid by them for the decisions made by their rulers. Yet Müller's self-adopted role as moral voice and her willingness to make broad historical comparisons over the past three decades have often met with controversy. Her outspokenness in criticising European governments for their hypocrisy and negligence with regard to human rights abuses have, for example, found relatively little resonance, while her attacks on the failure of nations such as Romania and Serbia adequately to process the history of
Seeking to explore the contemporary relevance of Herta Müller's work in the context of nation... more Seeking to explore the contemporary relevance of Herta Müller's work in the context of national and transnational memory cultures, this article examines the constitution of individual and collective memory and the ethical implications it carries for envisioning a more just future. My interest lies in exploring the challenge that Müller's approach to the labour of memory poses to conceptions of cultural memory and, related to it, to notions of national identity, national literary canons, and authorship. I ask how the ethical and aesthetic precepts of Müller's disruptive memories in her written work and her numerous public interventions may contribute to an affirmation of human rights today – at a time when democratic values are increasingly under threat. I argue that Müller's work – augmented by her public engagement – contributes to the reshaping of cultural memory from a narrowly conceived national one toward a deterritorialised collective memory that may transcend ...
DREAMING BY THE BOOK. By Elaine Scarry. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. 292 p., index.... more DREAMING BY THE BOOK. By Elaine Scarry. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. 292 p., index. The preposition in the title of Elaine Scarry's Dreaming by the Book means to work a double sense: Scarry urges that booksspecifically books of fiction and poetryenable ...
This essay investigates the political and strategic deployment of somatic vocabulary in Ulrike Me... more This essay investigates the political and strategic deployment of somatic vocabulary in Ulrike Meinhof's letter/poem which she wrote while incarcerated in solitary confinement in Köln-Ossendorf Prison in 1972. It links the bodily dissociation described in the poem with the breakdown of syntax, identity, and self-perception. Meinhof's poem brings the fragmented body into language-a language of repetitions, syntactic disruptions, parataxis, fragmentation, linguistic disorientation, and violent disassociation. The physical and psychic pain experienced in isolation and the imagery of the suffering body conjured up in the poem, suggest-especially to a German postwar audience-haunting associations with the Holocaust and the National Socialist treatment of unwanted persons and prisoners.
Reife und Alter verlaufen parallel zu den gesellschaftlichen Rollen als Tochter Mutter und Witwe ... more Reife und Alter verlaufen parallel zu den gesellschaftlichen Rollen als Tochter Mutter und Witwe und zu drei Existenzweisen, denen zu entgehen in der Erzäh¬ lung keine Frau imstande zu sein scheint Prostitution beziehungsweise die Einset¬ zung des Korpers als Tauschobjekt in jungen Jahren werden gefolgt von Ehe und schließlich der geistigen Umnachtung der mannerlosen Frauen Die Übergänge sind dabei fließend, d h es gibt Überschneidungen zwischen Prostitution und Ehe und der Zustand der geistigen Umnachtung tntt, z B bei einer jungen Witwe schon in einer früheren Lebensphase ein
Cities have long challenged, captivated, and inspired the cultural imagination of their inhabitan... more Cities have long challenged, captivated, and inspired the cultural imagination of their inhabitants and non-inhabitants alike. In contemporary society, urban areas seem to gain importance in every imaginable way and are recognized as privileged sites that engender, enable, and nourish creative endeavours, multicultural environments, economic mobility, and innovative responses to the challenges posed by capitalism and globalization. However, these urban narratives of ambition and creation are often undercut by material realities and ethnic, religious, and social tensions and are shot through with a myriad of thwarted aspirations. Gentrification leaves its marks on city demographics as it dramatically reconfigures urban landscapes and populations, pushing to the geographical margins those who are already restricted socially and culturally. Impinging on and deeply enmeshed with potent material realities are the political and cultural histories that haunt cites and forge their unique identities. This issue of Seminar focuses on the New Berlin as created through various cultural productions and gestures to the contemporary importance of the rising global culture of creative forms of dissent through the occupation of urban physical and ideational space. One of the economic and cultural powerhouses of Europe, Berlin also holds a unique place in the shaping of historical and contemporary images of Germany and Germanness. The historical, cultural, and geographical peculiarities of the German capital-"its delayed jump-start into the world-city ranks of Imperial and Weimar modernity, and its subsequent near-fatal marring by Nazi planning, wartime bombing, Cold War division, and now post-Wall reclamation and reinventionare the reason why the identity of this city remains so disjointed" (Ward 5). However, it is precisely this "disjointedness" and the lack of a fixed identity that allowed Berlin "to host one of the most dramatic processes of urban reinvention" (6). Since the fall of the Wall in 1989 and the concomitant shift in global relations of power, the renewed German capital has been the site of intense social, political, and cultural transformations. Although the "voids of Berlin" (Huyssen) have mostly been filled, there remain today seemingly unoccupied spaces of memory and possibility that titillate the imagination. Unlike other crowded, tradition-bound cities of western Europe, this newly loosened and less than completely capitalized and revitalized urban
Ten years on from the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature and thirty years after German reunif... more Ten years on from the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature and thirty years after German reunification and the fall of the Ceauşescu regime in Romania is a fitting moment to revisit Herta Müller's work and place it within broader intellectual, geographical, and historical horizons than has hitherto been attempted. It is also time to reconcile the public intellectual with the literary author. For it has long been clear that Müller's aesthetically innovative and highly acclaimed novels, essays, and collages stand as a testament to the major upheavals of twentieth-century European history. Drawing on her Romanian-German upbringing, overshadowed by the Second World War and Stalin-era deportations, and on her adult negotiation of the oppression of Romanian Communism and the shock of arrival in 1980s West Berlin, Müller has created a body of work which thematises guilt, trauma, alienation, flight, and resistance. Her works concern themselves with the experiences of common people-often at the margins of society or excluded from the narratives of ypolitical history yet caught up in historical currents-and promote awareness of the huge cost in terms of suffering and upheaval paid by them for the decisions made by their rulers. Yet Müller's self-adopted role as moral voice and her willingness to make broad historical comparisons over the past three decades have often met with controversy. Her outspokenness in criticising European governments for their hypocrisy and negligence with regard to human rights abuses have, for example, found relatively little resonance, while her attacks on the failure of nations such as Romania and Serbia adequately to process the history of
Seeking to explore the contemporary relevance of Herta Müller's work in the context of nation... more Seeking to explore the contemporary relevance of Herta Müller's work in the context of national and transnational memory cultures, this article examines the constitution of individual and collective memory and the ethical implications it carries for envisioning a more just future. My interest lies in exploring the challenge that Müller's approach to the labour of memory poses to conceptions of cultural memory and, related to it, to notions of national identity, national literary canons, and authorship. I ask how the ethical and aesthetic precepts of Müller's disruptive memories in her written work and her numerous public interventions may contribute to an affirmation of human rights today – at a time when democratic values are increasingly under threat. I argue that Müller's work – augmented by her public engagement – contributes to the reshaping of cultural memory from a narrowly conceived national one toward a deterritorialised collective memory that may transcend ...
DREAMING BY THE BOOK. By Elaine Scarry. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. 292 p., index.... more DREAMING BY THE BOOK. By Elaine Scarry. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. 292 p., index. The preposition in the title of Elaine Scarry's Dreaming by the Book means to work a double sense: Scarry urges that booksspecifically books of fiction and poetryenable ...
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