Counter Figures An Essay On Anti Metaphoric Resistance Paul Celan S Poetry And Poetics At The Limits Of Figurality

Paul Celan (1920-1970) is perhaps the most widely read of modern German-language poets, and yet his reputation has been constructed on a small body of primary texts. Thomas C. Connolly seeks to destabilize canonical readings of Celan's work by exploring the sous-oeuvre, the marginalized or unauthorized parts of a work that are traditionally eclipsed. These include fragments from Eingedunkelt, a cycle composed during Celan's incarceration in a psychiatric ward, as well as aphorisms, drafts, press cuttings, reading annotations, a translation of MallarmÉ, and poems from the late collections Fadensonnen and Schneepart. Engaging with theories of genetic criticism, theory of law, the history of painting, and Celan's poetic dialogue with Osip Mandel'shtam, Peter Weiss, and Rembrandt, this study seeks to move discussions of Celan's poetry onto less familiar ground, and to propose new ways of reading and enjoying literature. Thomas C. Connolly is Assistant Professor in French at Yale University, New Haven.

Explores the various ways in which poetic and philosophical writing meet in texts by, and on, Paul Celan.

rise to a wholly new poetics of translation. --Book Jacket.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Twilight of the Avant-Garde: Spanish Poetry 1980-2000 addresses the central problem of contemporary Spanish poetry: the attempt to preserve the scope and ambitiousness of modernist poetry at the end of the twentieth century. Jonathan Mayhew first offers a critical analysis of the called 'poetry of experience' of Luis García Montero, a tendency that is based on the supposed obsolescence of the modernist poetics of the first half of the century. While the 'poetry of experience' presents itself as a progressive attempt to 'normalise' poetry, to make it accessible to the common reader, Mayhew views it as a reactionary move that ultimately reduces poetry to the status of a minor genre. The author then turns his attention to the poetry of José Angel Valente and Antonio Gamoneda, whose poetry embodies the continuation of modernism, and to the work of younger women poets of the last two decades of the twentieth century. Throughout this controversial and provocative book, Mayhew challenges received notions about the value of poetic language in relation to the larger culture and society. It turns out that the cultural ambition of modernist poetics is still highly relevant even in an age in which more cynical views of literature seem prevalent. Ultimately, Mayhew writes as an advocate for the survival of more challenging and ambitious modes of poetic writing in the postmodern age.

Lightduress was written between June and December 1967 and appeared approximately three months after the poet's suicide in 1970. 1967, the year in which he composed most of this book, had been a difficult year for Celan. He was accused of plagiarism, attempted suicide, was interned in a psychiatric hospital and also separated from his wife. During this same period, on the other hand, Celan wrote more than half of the poems of Threadsuns and a major part of this volume, and in July he lectured at a German university. Translated by noted poet Pierre Joris.

This important theoretical work by Paul de Man sets forth a mode of reading and interpretation based on exemplary texts by Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. The readings start from unresolved difficulties in the critical traditions engendered by these authors, and they return to the places in the text where those difficulties are most apparent or most incisively reflected upon. The close reading leads to the elaboration of a more general model of textual understanding, in which de Man shows that the thematic aspects of the texts--their assertions of truth or falsehood as well as their assertions of values--are linked to specific modes of figuration that can be identified and described. The description of synchronic figures of substitution leads, by an inner logic embedded in the structure of all tropes, to extended, narrative figures or allegories. De Man poses the question whether such self-generating systems of figuration can account fully for the intricacies of meaning and of signification they produce. Throughout the book, issues in contemporary criticism are addressed analytically rather than polemically. Traditional oppositions are put in question by a rhetorical analysis which demonstrates why literary texts are such powerful sources of meaning yet epistemologically so unreliable. Since the structure which underlies this tension belongs to language in general and is not confined to literary texts, the book, starting out as practical and historical criticism or as the demonstration of a theory of literary reading, leads into larger questions pertaining to the philosophy of language. "Through elaborate and elegant close readings of poems by Rilke, Proust's Remembrance, Nietzsche's philosophical writings and the major works of Rousseau, de Man concludes that all writing concerns itself with its own activity as language, and language, he says, is always unreliable, slippery, impossible....Literary narrative, because it must rely on language, tells the story of its own inability to tell a story....De Man demonstrates, beautifully and convincingly, that language turns back on itself, that rhetoric is untrustworthy."--Julia Epstein, Washington Post Book World "The study follows out of the thinking of Nietzsche and Genette (among others), yet moves in strikingly new directions....De Man's text, almost certain to be endlessly provocative, is worthy of repeated re-reading."--Ralph Flores, Library Journal "Paul de Man continues his work in the tradition of 'deconstructionist criticism, '... which] begins with the observation that all language is constructed; therefore the task of criticism is to deconstruct it and reveal what lies behind. The title of his new work reflects de Man's preoccupation with the unreliability of language. ... The contributions that the book makes, both in the initial theoretical chapters and in the detailed analyses (or deconstructions) of particular texts are undeniable."--Caroline D. Eckhardt, World Literature Today