Axel Englund

Opera, it would appear, has developed a taste for sadomasochism. For decades now, radical stage directors have repeatedly dressed canonical operas—from Handel and Mozart to Wagner and Puccini, and beyond—in whips, chains, leather, and other regalia of SM and fetishism. Deviant Opera seeks to understand this phenomenon, approaching the contemporary visual code of perversion as a lens through which opera focuses and scrutinizes its own configurations of sex, gender, power, and violence. The emerging image is that of an art form that habitually plays with an eroticization of cruelty and humiliation, inviting its devotees to take sensual pleasure in the suffering of others. Ultimately, Deviant Opera argues that this species of opera fantasizes about breaking the boundaries of its own role-playing, and pushing its erotic power exchanges from the enacted to the actual.

What does it mean for poetry and music to turn to each other, in the shadow of the Holocaust, as a means of aesthetic self-reflection? How can their mutual mirroring, of such paramount importance to German Romanticism, be reconfigured to retain its validity after the Second World War? These are the core questions of Axel Englund's book, which is the first to address the topic of Paul Celan and music. Celan, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who has long been recognized as one of the most important poets of the German language, persistently evoked music and song in his oeuvre, from the juvenilia to the posthumous collections. Conversely, few post-war writers have inspired as large a body of contemporary music, including works by Harrison Birtwistle, György Kurtág, Wolfgang Rihm, Peter Ruzicka and many others. Through rich close readings of poems and musical compositions, Englund's book engages the artistic media in a critical dialogue about the conditions of their existence. In so doing, it reveals their intersection as a site of profound conflict, where the very possibility of musical and poetic meaning is at stake, and confrontations of aesthetic transcendentality and historical remembrance are played out in the wake of twentieth-century trauma.

This essay addresses the role of music in J. M. Coetzee's recent prose. Taking Summertime as a central example, it argues that Coetzee finds in music a means of problematizing issues of body and mind, of history and mediation , and of gender and sexuality.

W. G. Sebald wrote and published poetry from the early 1960s until his death in 2001. Even though Sebald's oeuvre is among the most assiduously studied in Germanistik today, however, his lyric poetry has yet to receive any serious attention by scholarly critics. Through close readings of two representative poems from Sebald's last years (“Ruhiges Novemberwetter” and “In Alfermée”), I seek to redress this neglect in the present article. These poems deal with well-known preoccupations of the author, such as landscape, memory, history, intertextuality, and death. On closer inspection, however, the details of their poetic form—their versification, phonetic patterning, imagery and semantic ambiguity—make it clear that they cannot be read as mere small-scale versions of his prose. Sebald's poems are complex and evocative works of great literary merit, which simultaneously partake of and question the generic specificity of poetry.

This article addresses the analogy between language and location, and between travel and interpretation, in the hitherto little-studied poetry of W.G. Sebald. Its primary example is ‘Day Return’, a two-part poem from the early 1980s, which describes a train trip through East Anglia to London and back. This poem develops the analogy between language and location in various ways. For one thing, it is a bilingual text: it intersperses a number of English lines among the German ones, evoking the linguistic ambiguity inherent in the experience of the expatriate writer. Moreover, as Sebald’s lyrical ‘I’ passes Ipswich, Romford, Stratford and Maryland on the way to Liverpool Street Station, he weaves these sites together in an intertextual web involving, among others, Dante, Kafka and Samuel Pepys. Finally, the journey is allegorically construed by the poetic voice as a descent into (and return from) the underworld. While many of these themes are familiar from Sebald’s later work, the value of his poems does not depend upon their relation to his canonised prose: they are fascinating literary constructs in their own right, deserving of close critical attention.

A thread of music is woven into the texture of Nelly Sachs’s poetry. Her verses evoke a host of musical motifs, in her early work mostly derived from the tradition of Romantic poetry in which music plays so important a part. As Sachs’s language progresses into her mature style, however, the configuration of these motifs is marked by an increasing idiosyncrasy. This article traces the development of two such musically tempered motifs, which recur throughout Sachs’s oeuvre. The first is the notion of a cosmic music: songs sung by the stars and the earth, the moon and the tide. This motif is rooted in the concept of the musica mundana, which organizes the universe but which, in Sachs’s interpretation, has been profoundly disturbed by earthly terror. The second is the conflation of music with emphatically corporeal images of death. In formulations reminiscent of the medieval Totentanz, Sachs casts the dead or wounded body as an instrument played upon by external agencies. These two musical motifs, moreover, are interconnected through a highly personal mysticism that posits a link between the microcosm of the human body, steeped in the concrete, painful experience of everyday existence, and the macrocosm of an intangible and hidden universe beyond the visible world. Thus, not only Sachs’s most original employment of melopoetic imagery, but also the outlines of a worldview that lies at the very core of her poetic project, can be found at the point of intersection between corporeal and cosmic music.

This essay addresses the problem of borders in Sebald's work by way of a five-section poem written in Manchester in the mid-1960s. The text, written as an intertextual dialogue with French novelist Michel Butor about the state of expatriation, is full of border crossings between languages, involving not only German and English, but also French, Latin and Yiddish. Borders are a central and paradoxical concern of Sebald’s. They threaten freedom by restricting mobility and imposing definitive interpretations, yet they are also a prerequisite of meaning: a boundless text is unreadable, and in a world without borders, the specificity of place loses its meaning. Sebald’s early poem stages an ambiguous, sometimes nostalgic, longing for linguistic, cultural and textual borders that may re-inscribe meaning into the existence of a late twentieth-century émigré who has been deprived of that solace by the possibility of seemingly limitless migration.

Languages of Exile examines the relationship between geographic and linguistic border crossings in twentieth-century literature. Like no period before it, the last century was marked by the experience of expatriation, forcing exiled writers to confront the fact of linguistic difference. Literary writing can be read as the site where that confrontation is played out aesthetically – at the intersection between native and acquired language, between indigenous and alien, between self and other – in a complex multilingual dynamic specific to exile and migration. The essays collected here explore this dynamic from a comparative perspective, addressing the paragons of modernism as well as less frequently studied authors, from Joseph Conrad and Peter Weiss to Agota Kristof and Malika Mokeddem. The essays are international in their approach; they deal with the junctions and gaps between English, French, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and other languages. The literary works and practices addressed include modernist poetry and prose, philosophical criticism and autobiography, DADA performance, sound art and experimental music theatre. This volume reveals both the wide range of creative strategies developed in response to the interstitial situation of exile and the crucial role of exile for a renewed understanding of twentieth-century literature.