Nelly Sachs : the poetics of silence and the limits of representation / by Elaine Martin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Martin, Elaine, 1982-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sachs, Nelly--Criticism and interpretation.

Sachs, Nelly.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (208 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berlin ; New York : De Gruyter, c2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Nelly Sachs. The Poetics of Silence and the Limits of Representation examines the poetry of the Nobel Prize-winning German Jewish poet Nelly Sachs. It firstly shifts established patterns of reception by analysing the author's reception in East and West Germany after the war and the role she came to play in the Federal Republic as a representative 'Poet of Reconciliation'. The study then situates Sachs' work within the framework of the debate surrounding the representation of the Holocaust by means of a thorough exposition of the aporia at the heart of Theodor Adorno's writings on post-Holocaust art. It demonstrates by close reading how Sachs' work is itself marked by this aporetic struggle and exposes in particular the aesthetic means by which Sachs renders this aporetic tension legible in her poetry through her use of, for example, prosopopoeia, her recasting of traditional metaphors and her reversal of biblical archetypes. The primary question addressed is whether Sachs' poetry, in spite of the fact that it thematises the impossibility of adequate representation, has representational value, or whether her work is bereft of concrete, representational meaning as a result of the often fragmented nature of her writing. In particular, the author confronts those critics who see in Sachs' work elements of consolation, reconciliation, or redemption in a transcendental realm, in favour of a reading that regards her work as permeated with the concrete events of the Holocaust and irreconcilably opposed to any notion of a religious sense-making and redemptive paradigm.

Contents:

Front matter

Acknowledgements

Contents

Introduction

I. Contexts

1. Nelly Sachs: A Tumultuous Reception History

2. The Problematics of Holocaust Representation

II. Practices

3. Nelly Sachs' Poetics of Silence: Poetry at the Limits of Representation

Conclusion

Bibliography

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

9786613400567

9781283400565

1283400561

9783110256734

3110256738

OCLC:

757261236