current issue
Immanent Transcendence in Rilke and Stevens
Rilke and Stevens evoke the question of transcendence, understanding the task of poetry within the post-Romantic context of the eclipse of the divine. This study shows that rather than simply give up on transcendence, Rilke and Stevens both innovate on and transform its momentum, and that this transformation constitutes a central achievement of their respective poetics and a core of their configurations of modernism. It argues that in the context of modern poetry transcendence, or “crossing beyond,” must be understood in two distinct senses, as vertical and horizontal projections, and it is the usurpation of one by the other or the transfer between them that distinguishes the poetry of Rilke and Stevens and makes a comparative reading particularly illuminating. Establishing their relation to the phenomenological tradition helps to bring out a sense of transcendence distinct from a traditional or Romantic longing for a realm above and beyond earthly existence. This would be an “immanent” transcendence, a crossing of horizons between perception and imagination or imagination and reality.
Das Ich und das Andere: Identität, Sinn und Erzählen in Die Amsel von Robert Musil
Robert Musils Novelle Die Amsel verhandelt die Problematik von Identität und Differenz im Selbstverhältnis. Personale Identität wird nicht substantiell als seelische Essenz oder als Einheit qualitativer Eigenschaften gedacht, sondern funktional fundiert. Sie fußt auf dem gleich bleibenden Bezug “Ich” zu unterschiedlichen Personen. Im Rahmen dieses differenzlogischen Verständnisses ist Identität niemals in einem abschließenden Sinne vollendet, sondern vollzieht sich in der Spannung von Konstruktion und Dekonstruktion. Sie bleibt stets offenes Projekt des jeweiligen Subjekts. Insbesondere anhand der zweiten Binnengeschichte der Novelle arbeitet der Artikel das Verhältnis zwischen Identitätskonstitution und dem Akt des Erzählens heraus. Erzählen wird als Antwort auf die verstörend-befreienden Erlebnisse des Protagonisten Azwei vorgestellt. Es vermittelt Kontinuität und Sinn, wo diese fragwürdig werden. Da Erzählen an Sprache geknüpft ist, wird die Identitäts- in eine Sprachproblematik überführt, die Grenzen und Möglichkeiten sprachlicher Repräsentation anzeigt. Ineinander verschränkt sind Identitäts- und Sprachproblematik über die Figur des irreduziblen Anderen, das jede identitätslogische Bestimmung aufhebt.
Mediating Worlds: The Occult as Projection of the New Woman in Weimar Culture
European women, who were experiencing political and social emancipation in the period following the First World War, were also faced with resistance that tried to define their place using traditional roles. Weimar Germany’s “New Woman” had thus been expected to continue to perform as wife and mother despite her participation in the masculine world of the workforce. Unable to completely fulfill either of these roles in this transitional period, the modern woman assumes what Mary Douglas identifies as an ambiguous sociological position. In this article, I read the social backlash against the New Woman into a study of women’s participation in the occult as seen in various Weimar cultural works including Mary Wigman’s expressive dance and Richard Oswald’s 1919 film, Unheimliche Geschichten.
Ethnic Irony: The Poetic Parabasis of the Promiscuous Personal Pronoun in Yoko Tawada’s “Eine leere Flasche” (A Vacuous Flask)
First-person narratives written under the sign of ethnicity are said to be not only “autobiographical” but also “abject.” Rereading the short but seminal and permanently inseminating text, “Eine leere Flasche” by the German Japanese author Yoko Tawada, this article argues for an alternative account of the literary conjunction of first-person writing and the social figure of ethnicity. The textual figure of the ethnicized first-person narrator need not be read as an “abjectly” or even “autobiographical” reproduction of the social figure of “ethnicity.” Rather, in Tawada’s poetic practice, the narrative “I” is a permanent parabasis, a material mark of textual irony interrupting the most basic form of prosopopoeia available in Indo-European languages, the first-person pronoun. Drawing upon Leslie Adelson’s work on German literatures of migration through Paul de Man’s work on “autobiography” and its textual irony, this article proposes that the poetically textual trope of irony and the socially contextual figure of ethnicity together constitute what Adelson calls a “riddle of referentiality,” in which neither this trope nor this figure can be confused with the other, yet also not read apart from each other. This article concludes that the social figure of the “ethnic” and the textual trope of irony are indistinguishable from each other. Its proposed notion of “ethnic irony” thus constitutes a pleonasm.
On the Other Side of Monolingualism: Fatih Akın’s Linguistic Turn(s)
The German filmmaker Fatih Akın has garnered acclaim over his fifteen-year career for directing intricate narratives of migration, mobile cultures, multicultural communities, and transnational subjectivities. Akın’s volatile and evolving cinematic approach to language and multilingualism, however, has attracted little critical attention—mirroring a scholarly predilection for “culture” over “language” in research on transnationalism since the 1990s. This article analyzes Akın’s recent feature film The Edge of Heaven (2007) as a retrospective and critical meditation on translingual dilemmas and identities in his preceding features—from Kurz und Schmerzlos (1998) to Im Juli (2000), Solino (2002) and Gegen die Wand (2004)—and on multilingualism in global-release feature film generally. As a counter-point to Chris Wahl’s conception of polyglot film in Das Sprechen des Spielfilms (2005), Akın’s features collectively offer a test palette for a new set of subgenres for multilingual cinema: the lingua franca film, the translatability fable, the undubbable film, the interlanguage film, and the semiodiverse film. The article concludes with some observations about the potential import of Akın’s multilingual representations for twenty-first century German Studies.