“Bridge to Antiquity“. Nostalgia, Exile, and Stoicism in the Poetry of Durs Grünbein
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Michael Eskin
Abstract
This essay deals with Durs Grünbein's extensive engagement with the classical legacy. What is its role and function in his poetry? What are some of the modes in which the poet's “desire to speak with the dead” (Greenblatt) articulates itself? To what extent are both past and present displaced, reinvented, and rewritten in and through their entwinement in Grünbein's poetry? These and similar, related questions bearing on the classics' continuous sway stake out the framework for inquiring into Grünbein's “bridge to antiquity.” Focusing on two poems in particular – “Vita Brevis” and “Julia Livilla” – this essay traces Grünbein's conversations with Homer, Horace, and Seneca, among others, with a view to disclosing what may be considered his unique contribution to our dealings with, responses to, and understanding of the past in and through art.
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Adressen der Mitarbeiter
- Introduction. Framing Contingency: History and Heterology
- Framing the Frame: Contingency, Connection and Divestiture in Literary History and Criticism
- Naming and Contingency, and Some Implications for Begriffsgeschichte
- About Artful Production of Contingency
- Zufälligkeitssinn. Adalbert Stifters Umgang mit der Kontingenz
- Subjective Contingency and Autobiographical Writing
- Counter-Memory and Phantasma
- La Panique Historique. History Encountering Contingency
- History as Effects of Power
- Neutralizing Contingency: Ammianus Marcellinus as a Participant in Julian's Persian Campaign, 363 AD
- “Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”: Hamlet from Berlin (East)
- “Bridge to Antiquity“. Nostalgia, Exile, and Stoicism in the Poetry of Durs Grünbein
- OΔYΣΣEYΣ OYTIΣ: Odysseus Nobody
- Darstellungen von Dora. Thomas Pynchons Gravity's Rainbow im Spannungsfeld von fiktionalen, historiographischen und erinnerungsbasierten Repräsentationen des Konzentrationslagers Mittelbau-Dora
- Die erlebte Rede als temporales Phänomen
- Rezensionen
Articles in the same Issue
- Adressen der Mitarbeiter
- Introduction. Framing Contingency: History and Heterology
- Framing the Frame: Contingency, Connection and Divestiture in Literary History and Criticism
- Naming and Contingency, and Some Implications for Begriffsgeschichte
- About Artful Production of Contingency
- Zufälligkeitssinn. Adalbert Stifters Umgang mit der Kontingenz
- Subjective Contingency and Autobiographical Writing
- Counter-Memory and Phantasma
- La Panique Historique. History Encountering Contingency
- History as Effects of Power
- Neutralizing Contingency: Ammianus Marcellinus as a Participant in Julian's Persian Campaign, 363 AD
- “Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”: Hamlet from Berlin (East)
- “Bridge to Antiquity“. Nostalgia, Exile, and Stoicism in the Poetry of Durs Grünbein
- OΔYΣΣEYΣ OYTIΣ: Odysseus Nobody
- Darstellungen von Dora. Thomas Pynchons Gravity's Rainbow im Spannungsfeld von fiktionalen, historiographischen und erinnerungsbasierten Repräsentationen des Konzentrationslagers Mittelbau-Dora
- Die erlebte Rede als temporales Phänomen
- Rezensionen
