Zawacki, Andrew
TR 9:35 AM
Park Hall 0259
Afterwar / Nachkrieg : Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann
Focusing on Paul Celan (1920-1970) and Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973), two of the most prominent postwar writers in Western Europe, this seminar will confront the myriad ways—social and aesthetic, literary and philosophical, private no less than public—in which, in the decades following the end of WWII, their writings seemed haunted by an incommensurable past and an equally confounding present, challenging the authors to redefine human and literary relations. Putting each writer’s poetry at the center of engagement, the course will likewise address their critical essays and speeches, the correspondence they maintained with one another as well as with others, and Bachmann’s sole novel Malina.
These texts, in turn, will be frequently supplemented and contextualized by the relevant work of philosophers, theorists, literary and cultural critics, and poets. (These may include Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Blanchot, Martin Buber, Anne Carson, Jean Daive, Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Pierre Joris, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Emmanuel Levinas, Heather McHugh, Michael Palmer, Nelly Sachs, W.G. Sebald, and Rosmarie Waldrop.)
Among the topics structuring the course are hermetic poetry, poetry and atrocity, the dis/figuration of language, the poetics of estrangement and encounter, the ethics of friendship and love, surveillance and secrecy, witness and mourning.
Co-taught with Dr. Martin Kagel, A.G. Steer Professor of German in the department of Germanic & Slavic studies, this seminar will be cross-listed with GRMN 4510: Discourses of Post-War Literature. Offered in fall to coincide with Celan’s hundredth birthday, the seminar may feature an associated event or series of lectures, to be organized with substantial student participation.
Taught in English.