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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, theauthor 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.
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Elaine Martin Nelly Sachs
Elaine Martin
Nelly Sachs The Poetics of Silence and the Limits of Representation
De Gruyter
ISBN 978-3-11-025672-7 e-ISBN 978-3-11-025673-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Martin, Elaine, 1982− Nelly Sachs : the poetics of silence and the limits of representation / by Elaine Martin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-3-11-025672-7 (acid-free paper) 1. Sachs, Nelly − Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PT2637.A4184Z719 2011 8311.914−dc23 2011016184
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. © 2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston Cover illustration: Detail of Nelly Sachs’ apartment at Bergsundsstrand 23, Stockholm. © National Library of Sweden, MS L 90:8:11. Photographer Harry Järv. Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ⬁ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com
Acknowledgements I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Professor Florian Krobb, whose encouragement and enthusiasm helped me towards the completion of this book, and whose depth of knowledge has been and continues to be an invaluable resource. Thanks also to Professor Karen Leeder of New College, Oxford, whose input was greatly appreciated, and to Dr. Jeff Morrison, whose constructive feedback made the book a more pleasant read. Furthermore, I wish to extend a word of gratitude to all members of the German Department at National University of Ireland Maynooth for their collegiality during the past number of years. Without the financial assistance made possible by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the John and Pat Hume Scholarship from NUI Maynooth, this project would not have come to fruition. My thanks therefore to these two bodies for funding the doctoral dissertation from which this book evolved. Additionally, the book’s publication was financed by publication grants from the National University of Ireland and National University of Ireland Maynooth. My thanks to both institutions for trus