Thresholds, Encounters: Paul Celan and the Claim of Philology

by Kristina Mendicino (Editor), Dominik Zechner (Editor)

Overview

Paul Celan's works dwell on the threshold between the extremes of poetic expression and philosophical reflection. The divergent literary and critical idioms that have marked Celan's writing—and that Celan's writing has come to mark for others (Hamacher, Derrida, Szondi)—thus call for a new philology. This philology cannot be situated within presupposed genres or fields but rather explores the ways in which poetic and philosophical ambitions meet in texts by, and on, Celan. The first part of Thresholds, Encounters ("Ex-posing the Poem") speaks to issues of history, ecology, and aurality; the second part ("Language Dislodged") delves into Celan's articulations of encounter, positionality, and translation. Throughout, contributors probe the consequences of Celan's poetry for thinking and writing, while inviting readers from different disciplinary spaces to further pace out the liminal zones opened by his oeuvre.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781438494395
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	09/01/2023
Series:	SUNY series, Literature . . . in Theory
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	324
File size:	898 KB

About the Author

Kristina Mendicino is Associate Professor of German Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Announcements: On Novelty and Passive Voices (On the Subject of Phenomenology and Other Figures of Speech), both published by SUNY Press. Dominik Zechner is Assistant Professor of German at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Dis-positions: Introduction
Kristina Mendicino and Dominik Zechner

Part 1: Ex-posing the Poem

History

1. “In the Swell of Wandering Words”: Celan’s “Sprich auch du”
Michael G. Levine

2. A Different Witness: Bearing with the Past in Paul Celan’s “Engführung”
Simone Stirner

Ecology

3. Flower Talk
Jan Mieszkowski

4. Poetic Involution: Adorno, Celan, Nature
Natalie Lozinski-Veach

Aurality

5. Allophony: Celan’s Niemandsrosen-Lieder
Michael Auer

6. “A Chest Full of Cello Boughs”: The Sonorous Force of Writing in Deconstructive Readings of Celan
Naomi Waltham-Smith

Part 2: Language Dislodged

Encounters

7. A limine
Kristina Mendicino

8. With—Paul Celan
Pasqual Solass

Positions

9. Occupiability
Sarah Stoll, trans. Aida Feng

10. For Shame of Language
Dominik Zechner

Translations

11. Poetic Approach: Celan’s Radio Essay “Die Dichtung Ossip Mandelstamms”
Irina Kogan

12. The Mimetic Desire of Translation: Reading Celan and Derrida with Girard
Christine Frank

List of Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

"…this book stakes its 'claim of philology' by estranging preexisting critical positions on Celan and fathoming his multivocal idioms as if for the first time." — Critical Inquiry

"Beautiful and very open in its structure, Thresholds, Encounters is an invitation to dialogue." — Ilit Ferber, author of Language Pangs: On Pain and the Origin of Language

"The volume demonstrates an exemplary fidelity to a practice of philology that is attentive to language's capacity for ungrounding its propositions. It would not be an exaggeration to describe these performances of reading as tours de force." — Jason Groves, author of The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary

From the Publisher