Writing as Violence and Counter-Violence in Paul Celan’s Poetry and Elfriede Jelinek’s Prose
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Book chapter › Research › peer-review
My ambition is to show, by way of close reading, how Celan’s poem “Todesfuge” (1945) and Jelinek’s novel Die Klavierspielerin (1983) both mirror and subvert the violence that they are up against; Celan’s poem by mirroring the cruel alliance between violence and beauty; Jelinek’s prose by arranging collisions between the discourses that she cites. In order to prove this point I call on Walter Benjamin's distinction between mythic and divine violence, Slavoj Zizek's point that "language is the first and greatest divider", and Eric Santner's and Georges Didi-Huberman's (divergent) concepts of "incarnation". I show how incarnation is at work in Celan’s verses and Jelinek’s prose—as an incarnation of the subject, as a materialization of the signifier, as the violence inherent in language and as violence against signifying language, and even as a theme.
Original language | Danish |
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Title of host publication | The Aesthetics of Violence |
Editors | Hans Jacob Ohldieck, Gisle Selnes |
Publisher | Scandinavian Academic Press |
Publication date | 2020 |
Pages | 155-182 |
ISBN (Print) | 978-82-304-0295-5 |
Publication status | Published - 2020 |
- Faculty of Humanities
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ID: 255986573