Volume 59, Issue 1

Right-wing authoritarians in America today know that they need poetry for cultural legitimation but cannot seem to produce anything contemporary that would perform that function in intellectual life. Into this breach step Milo Yiannopoulos and Michele Malkin, with their “America First!” reading list, which includes, among other things, a fair bit of poetry. This article reads the poetry selection of the list in the context of its other recommendations, before turning to the sentimental nativist and neomedievalist Romanticism that emerges from this logic. A glance at the poetry of neo-Nazi hate website Stormfront indicates that the demotic and insular tenor demanded by the authoritarian personality today is difficult to reconcile with any plausible concept of intellectual life. The poetic efforts of less explicitly fascist poetry magazines, such as Atop the Cliffs and Rifts in Stone , confirm this by struggling to break free from the anti-intellectual Romanticism demanded by the cultural logic of right-wing authoritarianism today. Rather than recalling the line from Schlageter about culture, though, the essay concludes by remembering that authoritarianism’s relationship to high-powered assault weapons is anything but metaphorical, and that neo-Nazi verse is the lyric poetry of mass murder.

The paper investigates descriptions of slavery in early 19 th -century British travel writing about America and ponders the question of the presence of empathy in them. It shows that while most passages referring to the slaves’ situation can hardly be called empathetic, and that within the economy of suffering operating in the discussed travelogues the narrators tend to appropriate the pain of the people whom they observe, there is still a possibility of the texts in question evoking the reader’s empathy. This happens on two levels: first, the reader may empathize with the white traveler; second, and more indirectly, he/she may empathize with the black slave. The paper analyzes how such a response is produced within the said travelogues, relying mostly on Suzanne Keen’s work on narrative empathy.

This article examines Christa Wolf's Sommerstück (1989) through the lens of modernist utopian thinking and genre-theory. The novel challenges the common-sense definition of utopia as an imagined paradisiacal state and the idyll as an idealized vision of communal harmony, complicating the question of dwelling within a utopian idyll at the specific historical conjuncture that preceded the Mauerfall . Interrogating the function of fantasy and the structure of mirage in idealized moments of crystallization with reference to Jameson’s opposition of idyll to utopia, the article contends that utopian impulses in Sommerstück aim to replace the harsh reality of East Germany through the idealization of the quotidian. Although lampooned by Hegel in the Aesthetics as lacking development and the many-sidedness of human interests evinced in epic poetry, the idyll is nonetheless positioned as the prosaic ground for romance and on a continuum with hybrid forms of epic. The article charts the temporal structure of development and progression inherent in the formalism of the genre in terms of the temporal structure of utopian striving. I first identify the temporal structure of idyll and utopia as outlined in the narrative. Of paramount importance is how the narrative, despite being rooted in a specific historical context, attempts to create a utopian vision of social relations as at once timeless and evolving. The shifting relationship between utopian ideals and a changing political reality becomes a focal point for thinking the inseparability of the idyllic from the utopian. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, anti-utopian elements of the negative ideal – the remnants of the old society of control and surveillance – were rendered more prominent to the observers of the divide. From a certain vantage point, then, one could say that the phenomenon of utopia is one of perspectival and spectatorial distance; it intersects with the idyllic mirage of a harmonious collocation in a state of innocence where different societal ideals and classes merge into indistinction. The article deepens the analysis of utopia by considering it within broader frameworks of genre-theory and German idealist thinking, suggesting that the quest for a perfect society may involve control, assimilation, and power struggles – dystopian themes highlighted by the novel when reread in light of catastrophe and a critical reevaluation of the meaning of dwelling at ‘the end of history.’

The South-Tyrolean author Sepp Mall, born in 1955, is renowned for his intricate artistic poems. For the writer, composing poetry is a practice of deceleration: an act of both reducing speed and slowing down. Similarly, he describes the process of reading poems as a practice of standing still, of reflecting, and as a highly attentive practice of perceiving and sensing (Mall, 2022). The following article brings Mall’s long poem “Unwirkliches Blau (Rondo)” (Unreal blue [Rondo]) from his most recent poetry collection Holz und Haut (Wood and skin) into focus, and discusses in which ways the poem opens up novel spaces of perception regarding time by seizing alternate temporalities – in other words, non-human-centred temporalities, as suggested by the poem itself. These spaces of perception manifest as utopian niches in the sense of deep, small, and secluded chronotopes of imagination and perception, which brim with transformative potential as they offer a means of widening one’s perception of temporalities.