1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910810575203321

Autore

Martin Elaine <1982->

Titolo

Nelly Sachs : the poetics of silence and the limits of representation / / by Elaine Martin

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berlin ; ; New York, : De Gruyter, c2011

ISBN

1-283-40056-1

9786613400567

3-11-025673-8

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (208 p.)

Disciplina

831/.914

831.914

Soggetti

LITERARY CRITICISM / European / German

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- Introduction -- I. Contexts -- 1. Nelly Sachs: A Tumultuous Reception History -- 2. The Problematics of Holocaust Representation -- II. Practices -- 3. Nelly Sachs' Poetics of Silence: Poetry at the Limits of Representation -- Conclusion -- Bibliography

Sommario/riassunto

Nelly Sachs. The Poetics of Silence and the Limits of Representation examines the poetry of the Nobel Prize-winning German Jewish poet Nelly Sachs. It firstly shifts established patterns of reception by analysing the author's reception in East and West Germany after the war and the role she came to play in the Federal Republic as a representative 'Poet of Reconciliation'. The study then situates Sachs' work within the framework of the debate surrounding the representation of the Holocaust by means of a thorough exposition of the aporia at the heart of Theodor Adorno's writings on post-Holocaust art. It demonstrates by close reading how Sachs' work is itself marked by this aporetic struggle and exposes in particular the aesthetic means by which Sachs renders this aporetic tension legible in her poetry through her use of, for example, prosopopoeia, her recasting of traditional metaphors and her reversal of biblical archetypes. The primary question addressed is whether Sachs' poetry, in spite of the



fact that it thematises the impossibility of adequate representation, has representational value, or whether her work is bereft of concrete, representational meaning as a result of the often fragmented nature of her writing. In particular, the author confronts those critics who see in Sachs' work elements of consolation, reconciliation, or redemption in a transcendental realm, in favour of a reading that regards her work as permeated with the concrete events of the Holocaust and irreconcilably opposed to any notion of a religious sense-making and redemptive paradigm.