An odyssey for our time : Barbara Köhler's Niemands Frau / edited by Georgina Paul ; cover design, Aart Jan Bergshoeff ; Mirjam Bitter [and eight others], contributors.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Paul, Georgina.

Bergshoeff, Aart Jan.

Bitter, Mirjam.

Series:

German monitor ; no. 78.

German Monitor ; 78

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Köhler, Barbara, 1959-2021.

Köhler, Barbara.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (237 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam, Netherlands ; New York : Rodopi, 2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In her 2007 poem cycle Niemands Frau , Barbara Köhler returns to Homer’s Odyssey , not to retell it, but to take up some of the threads it has woven into the cultural tradition of the West – and to unravel them, just as Penelope, the wife of the hero who called himself Nobody, unravelled each night the web she re-wove by day. Köhler’s return to the Odyssey takes place under the sign of a grammatical shift, from ‘er’ to ‘sie’, from the singular hero to a plurality of female voices – Nausicaa, Circe, Calypso, Ino Leucothea, Helen and Penelope herself – with implications for thinking about identity, power and knowledge, about gender and relationality, but also about the corporeality and multivocality which underlies the ‘virtual reality’ of the printed text. The eight essays in this volume explore Köhler’s iridescent poem cycle from a variety of different angles: its context in contemporary German refigurations of the classical; its engagement with Homer and the classical tradition; its contribution to feminist philosophy of the subject and a female ‘dialectic of enlightenment’; its incorporation of the voices of poetic predecessors; and the surprising alliance it uncovers between poetry and quantum theory.

Contents:

Preliminary material / Editors An Odyssey for Our Time

Introduction / Georgina Paul

‘Argo Cargo’: The Role of the Classical Past in Contemporary German Poetry / Karen Leeder

Polytropia. Barbara Köhlers Erkundung des Griechischen (Homer, Odyssee / Sappho, Anaktoria-Fragment) / Hans Jürgen Scheuer

Niemands Frau as a ‘Minor Translation’ of the Odyssey from ‘er’ to ‘sie’ / Rebecca May Johnson

‘Nocheinmal zurückkommen’: Reading Köhler with Irigaray and Cavarero / Rachel Jones

Transpositionen von Text, Textil und Textur. Barbara Köhlers und Rosi Braidottis Entwürfe beweglicher, aber nicht haltloser Subjektivitäten / Mirjam Bitter

The ‘nachtseite des abendlands’. Barbara Köhler’s Niemands Frau and the Dialectic of Enlightenment / Helmut Schmitz

Strange Loops and Quantum Turns in Barbara Köhler’s Niemands Frau / Margaret Littler

Different Voices: Other Poets in Barbara Köhler’s Niemands Frau, with a Special Study of the Significance of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land / Georgina Paul

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL / Barbara Köhler

Contributors / Editors An Odyssey for Our Time

Index / Editors An Odyssey for Our Time.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references at the end of each chapters and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed January 28, 2014).

ISBN:

94-012-1015-2

OCLC:

868067841

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9789401210157 DOI