Volume 42, Issue 2

Goethe's and Lessing's analyses of antique statues of Venus illustrate the classical concept of representation in art. The Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836–1895) deconstructs this concept. In his novella ‘Venus in Furs’ (1870), in which the Medici Venus statue plays a prominent role, Masoch changes the relation of signifier and the signified: not the statue but Vanda, the beautiful beloved of the protagonist, incarnates perfect beauty and serves as an analogue of the statue. Masoch's novel reverses the common process of creating a picture: the picture is staged first, and only afterwards is it projected on the canvas. The procedure imitates the phenomenology of photography.

Writing in two languages that are very alien from each other, the Japanese author Tawada has developed a poetics of translation that does not literally overcome the distance between the two cultures but confirms it by playing with linguistic differences and similarities and “translating transformation” (metamorphosis). For Tawada, writing in any language is the ceaseless attempt to produce a sensual translation from a “language that does not exist” – a language of objects, ghosts, dreams etc. This demands immense adaptability from the writer and the reader.

Can the philosophical concept of ethno-poetics, as developed in Michel Foucault's “écriture de soi,” be made fruitful for literary analyses? In the ancient concept of “cura sui”, personal care for oneself, is immediately meant to be also an orientation in political discourse; Foucault's notion does not imply this. Furthermore, Foucault's concept of self-writing cannot be applied to Hans Henny Jahnn's and Heiner Müller's inter-culturally oriented versions of Medea, which are grounded in the coherence of a discourse of alterity that incorporates ruptures and discontinuities in the ethno-poetic process of its constitution. This feature is constitutive also of Hubert Fichte's texts, which cultivate, like those of Jahnn and Müller, a trans-personal code of ethno-aesthetics. The foreign can neither be reconstructed ideologically, nor be rehabilitated ethno-poetically. Fichte's provocative travel reports and sub-cultural documents systematically and programmatically resist the hermeneutic mediation of what is foreign. These texts plead, instead, for an ethno-aesthetic “wording of the world” (Weltverwörterung): writing opens a horizon of discourse, not one of understanding.

The Nicaraguan modernist poet Rubén Darío often refers to the German poet Heinrich Heine. Intertextual references, and similarities in the two poets' socio-cultural positions, constitute the point of departure for a joint reading of Heine's poem “Vitzliputzli” (1851) and Rubén Darío's narrative “Huitzilopoxtli” (1914). The two authors examine colonization and violence by means of demystification and deconstruction. Rarely examined passages show that with respect to gender, which seems irrelevant at first sight, the myth stays virulent and reveals not only the dynamics but also the limits of cultural encounters.

Arcus tangens refers to a textual problem: texts are suspended between sameness and difference, for they are reborn in the act of reading and become thus different from themselves. Textuality is provocation and its partially pre-shaped reaction. These characteristics constitute some kind of a bow (arcus) , as in Heinrich von Kleist's remarks on architecture, or in Peter Waterhouse's translations of Michael Hamburger's poetry. Kleist points out that a vault sustains itself, for all of its bricks tend (or even want ) to fall: to remove a single brick means to destroy tension that is the vault.

Baudelaire's poem “The Swan,” has inaugurated a new topos in European poetry: the modern city as a necropolis. Expressly moving away from Verhaeren's celebration of industrial landscapes, Rilke adopts this topos in his Tenth “Duino Elegy”, just as Apollinaire and T.S Eliot rely on Baudelaire when writing their poems on the modern city. In Baudelaire's, as well as in Apollinaire's and T.S. Eliot's own particular visions, the city occasions an endless walk towards death, even towards emptiness. Rilke creates from this topos an imaginary space. The long walk of his poetic figure through repulsive spaces here below and radiant spaces in the beyond always retains a teleology. In the final constellation, the elements, with their earthly and celestial orientations, link in an absolute harmony. Rilke's transformation of the topos shows the singularity of his work, his unique trust in the creative power of language.

Ingeborg Bachmann's poetic cycle “Lieder von einer Insel” is based on her sentimental encounter with the composer Hans-Werner Henze in Ischia (1953), as well as on experience of a landscape in which wind, sea, and volcano bring together the Ancient Greek and Christian cultural traditions. Using Roland Barthes's “Fragments d'un discours amoureux” about the possibility of speaking of love ex-negativo (from the point of view of a loss), and Bachmann's phrase “Es gibt in der Kunst keinen Fortschritt in der Horizontale, sondern nur das immer neue Aufreissen einer Vertikale”, the “Lieder” can be read as a cultural palimpsest expressed in a polyphony of voices: Bachmann constructed the cycle as a musical score. The cultural, personal, and universal experiences of love; death, loss, aorgic plenitude, and destruction; hope in a radical but impossible rebirth – all these oxymora are represented by an encounter of poetic and musical principles. The synchronicity of memory levels and the renunciation of pure sound turn this poetic composition into a “musica impura”.

Relying on Spinoza's system, we may assume that a poem is – among other things – the verbal register of an affective process. This can yield valuable insights into the epistemological value of poetry and its ethical relevance. Reading Walt Whitman's work under such premises, we find in openness to affections a condition of knowledge: maximizing favorable affections to understand their adequate causes allows not only the passive expression of an affective balance, but also the active generation of affects and ideas, thus contributing to the growth of our living power.

Writers may perceive exile, even if they merely inherit it, either as burdening or enriching, as a loss of their native culture or as a chance to receive new artistic inspirations. The condition of exile may, consequently, be converted differently into literary form, as the work of three female writers of Hungarian origin living in Switzerland shows. Agota Kristof never got over the loss of her mother tongue, whereas Zsuzsanna Gahse and Christina Viragh succeeded in converting their – inherited – exile into a new, postmodernist identity.

Formalist definitions of the fantastic in literature, such as the well-known one by Zvetan Todorov, overlook the historical and cultural variants of the genre. Fantastic stories from different cultures represent the unlikely, the invisible, or the supernatural phenomena (such as dragons and ghosts) in similar ways, which suggests that the fantastic is universal but conceived differently in different cultures and epochs. Fantastic literature can be defined as poeticized storytelling about the imaginary of the unknown. Yet the unknown today may be known tomorrow. As the Chinese writer Lao Zi remarks: “The unknown is the commencement of all becoming; the known is the mother of all becoming.” Owen Barfield's theory of the evolution of consciousness, and Goethe's view of the evolution of the human mind, can be used for a new periodization of the genre, that divides the poetic renderings of the fantastic into four stages.

Dieter Forte's German drama Luther und Münzer (1971), and Q (1999), a first novel by the young Italian authors' collective “Luther Blissett,” both depict social and religious revolutions in early-modern Germany. Beyond formal (and mostly superficial) differences, the analysis of narrative details reveals certain common patterns in these two examples of “alternative literature”: re-inventions of historical characters, representation of religious and political institutions, and, above all, a re-interpretation of historical facts. These works and their respective receptions show how social criticism and political discontent have changed in Western Europe in the last thirty years.

The history of imaginary libraries can be traced back to François Rabelais. Most of such libraries were created for satirical purposes rather than bibliographical amusement. Somewhere during the seventeenth century, auction catalogues also became a vehicle of political satire. One of the most successful literary hoaxes involved an imaginary library and its auction catalogue. The announcement of an auction in the small provincial town of Binche in the Belgian province of Hainault on August 10, 1840 fooled librarians and collectors alike, for neither the collector nor his collection existed. The auction never took place. Was it just a hoax, or did the event reflect some painful truths about the 1830 separation of the Low Countries into two powerless mini states?

Helmut C. Jacobs, Gisela Schlüter, Christof Weiand, Hermann H. Wetzel (Hrsg.): Die Zeitschrift Il Caffè , Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2003, 280 Seiten. ( Felice Balletta ) Hans Grote: Petrarca lesen , Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 2006 (legenda 7), 196 Seiten. ( Karin Becker ) Richard Block: The Spell of Italy, Vacation, Magic and the Attraction of Goethe , Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006, 310 Seiten. ( Francesca Bravi ) Thomas Amos: Architectura cimmeria Manie und Manier phantastischer Architektur in Jean Rays Malpertuis , Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2006, 244 Seiten. ( Karl R. Kegler ) Julia Genz: Analphabeten und der blinde Fleck der Literatur München: Fink, 2004, 432 Seiten. ( Alexander Nebrig ) Lars Koch: Der Erste Weltkrieg als Medium der Gegenmoderne Zu den Werken von Walter Flex und Ernst Jünger , Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006, 387 Seiten. ( Alexander Rubel ) Felix Holtschoppen: Rebellische Technik Maschinenphantasien in der literarischen Phantastik um 1900 , Berlin: Trafo, 2005, 165 Seiten. ( Birgit Spengler ) Manfred Beller: Eingebildete Nationalcharaktere. Vorträge und Aufsätze zur literarischen Imagologie . Herausgegeben von Elena Agazzi in Zusammenarbeit mit Raul Calzoni, Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2006, 278 Seiten. ( Stefanie Stockhorst )