GERMANIC REVIEW最新文献_第2页

Nature, Condensed: Reading Paul Celan, Esther Kinsky, and Theodor W. Adorno in the Anthropocene 《自然，浓缩:人类世中保罗·策兰、埃斯特·金斯基和西奥多·阿多诺的解读》

3区文学

GERMANIC REVIEW Pub Date : 2023-10-02 DOI: 10.1080/00168890.2023.2257350

Natalie Lozinski-Veach

{"title":"Nature, Condensed: Reading Paul Celan, Esther Kinsky, and Theodor W. Adorno in the Anthropocene","authors":"Natalie Lozinski-Veach","doi":"10.1080/00168890.2023.2257350","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00168890.2023.2257350","url":null,"abstract":"AbstractThis essay explores a particular kind of German postwar aesthetics as a framework for thinking through the conceptual challenges of the Anthropocene. Focusing on the relationship between nature and history, the article reads Paul Celan’s “The World” from Speech Grille (Sprachgitter) together with Esther Kinsky’s 2013 volume Nature Preserve (Naturschutzgebiet) to trace how both authors intertwine commemoration of the Shoah with exact attention to the more-than-human world. These two aspects of their poetry are not merely complementary but mutually constitutive; together, they give shape to the ecological entanglements that Donna Haraway has referred to as naturecultures. Considered in relation to Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, both poets combine reflections on language, history, and the natural world in a way that remains conscious of its own mediation as a specifically human—and, as such, necessarily partial—form of expression. In this way, memory gives rise to a poetics of condensation, a form of literary expression in which history and nature, including human nature, emerge as interwoven in language.Keywords: AnthropoceneecologyaestheticshistoryHolocaustnatureculturespoetryShoah Notes1 Bertolt Brecht, The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, trans. David Constantine and Tom Kuhn (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2019), 734.2 Due to its etymological focus on humans, the term Anthropocene has been contentious. Plantationocene and Chthulucene are possible alternatives. The former explicitly links our current ecological crisis with colonialism and racism, while the latter, coined by Donna Haraway, emphasizes non-human agency and the need to move away from anthropocentric frameworks. Sophie Sapp Moore et al., “The Plantationocene and Plantation Legacies Today,” Edge Effects, January 22, 2019, https://edgeeffects.net/plantation-legacies-plantationocene/. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).3 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222, 207.4 As Chakrabarty notes, this distinction had been in place “even in environmental histories that saw the two entities in interaction” (207). Jason Moore has referred to this dynamic as the “Green Arithmetic, […] the idea that our histories may be considered and narrated by adding up Humanity (or Society) and Nature, or even Capitalism plus Nature” (2). For Moore, this calculation continues to do damage by projecting the existence of separate realms, “Society without nature, Nature without humans.” Such a division has, of course, always been questionable, and yet Cartesian dualisms have hardened into political and economic agendas, determining not only extractionist policies, but also efforts to curb them, shaping approaches to conservation over the course of the twentieth century. On this last point, see also Jamie Lorimer, “The Anthropo-Scene: A Guide for the Perplexed,”","PeriodicalId":54022,"journal":{"name":"GERMANIC REVIEW","volume":"100 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135902760","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}