A Medieval Open Work

Guigo II is commonly known and praised among specialists of Western mysticism for his Scala claustralium, a work that presents a spiritual program for cloistered monks. His Meditations, on the other hand, have usually been relegated to the margin of attention. The First Meditation, in particular, is generally regarded as a minor piece. The paper argues, however, that a new approach can make better sense of the First Meditation, while also enabling us to recognize its specific function and value. Seen from this new perspective, Guigo’s purpose with the text is to train and exercise his readers’ minds according to the spiritual program laid out in the Scala. The paper shows that the First Meditation realizes that goal, surprisingly, by having the same essential features that Umberto Eco found in the ‘open works’ of the Western avant-garde.

Revisiting ‘Third-Person’ Narrative Unreliability

Taking its cue from the critical treatment given to unreliable narration by Wayne C. Booth and his early followers, and in contrast to the claims often made in the field of authentication theory, this paper seeks to join the debate on “third-person” narrative unreliability by outlining an inclusive approach to this phenomenon in which the “person” parameter need not be a determining factor. To theorize and illustrate this approach, a methodological context is first developed by juxtaposing Genette’s revisionist stance on voice and perception with Booth’s 1961 dismissal of the vocal issue and his controversial assimilation of tellers and observers. Then Ryan’s dissenting views are addressed by identifying common ground between her idea of the impersonal narrator and the principles of inclusivity which precisely rest on the impersonating potential of that figure. Finally the inclusive conception of unreliability is shown at work in three Jamesian tales – “The Aspern Papers” (1888), “The Liar” (1888), and “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) – whose different vocal options do not seem to immunize their narrators against charges of untrustworthiness.

Stimmenarrangement

Frauenlob’s Marienleich has been studied primarily from the perspective of its elaborate metaphors and allegories. Scholars have identified the source of these metaphors in the exegesis of the Song of Songs as well as other Old Testament books and described the overlapping of diverse metaphorical traditions in the text. This paper argues that not only the metaphors, but also the voices of the Marienleich are artfully arranged. The essay shows how switching of the voice, echo effects, and multiplication of the voice create a polyphony that reflects the intertextual underpinning of Marian praise as well as Mary’s mediatory position between God and the faithful who praise her.

Ein anders unfester Text

Printed anonymously in 1587, the henceforth immensely successful Historia von D. Johann Fausten is both a textual and a narratologic provocation. This is brought about by the polyphony of sources and genres compiled by its author which do not produce a homogeneous whole. But it is also the result of a specific, hybrid conception of text and narration, which intendedly creates ambiguity and scatters irritation everywhere. A valid interpretation is thereby sheerly impossible, which presumably is the most significant reason for the long and controversial discussions among readers and re-tellers, running from Christopher Marlowe (1592) and the Wagnerbuch (1593) up to Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (1947). This article explores some essential textual aspects of this inexhaustible narrative, such as the discursive and hermeneutic predominance of intradiegetic instances (first of all Mephostophiles) and the decommissioning of the narrator by inserted documents, transtextual references, and primarily by paratexts which almost lead a life of their own on the margins of the story in a proper sense. In this way, the text gets fluid, and its reception becomes an endless search for a coherent meaning which isn’t right there.

Sprache – die Mitte der Welt Dichtung – die Mitte der Sprache

Art seemingly responds to a universal anthropologic need for art, caused by what the philosopher Schelling designates as the “unendlichen Mangel am Sein”. Its answer is based on the dense presence of the artwork. The form of the poem as exploration of the medium of language will be exemplarily elaborated on in the following analysis.

Interpreting Hamlet’s Pregnant Silences: Nietzsche and Benjamin

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the protagonist frequently and eloquently refers to his own taciturnity and to the fundamental insights into the ways of the world that this silence conceals from his interlocutors. It is partly due to this emphasis on a pivotal inaccessibilty that the play has provoked numerous philosophical interpretations. For example, Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy and Walter Benjamin in Origin of the German Trauerspiel have dealt with Hamlet’s loquacious refusal to communicate, and their interpretations, while problematic in some respects, can contribute to a better understanding of the drama, especially when they are placed in relation to one another. While Nietzsche’s somewhat forced interpretation traces Hamlet’s silence to the Dionysian experience of ancient tragedy, Benjamin’s counter-interpretation construes this silence as the expression of a specifically Protestant, melancholic conception of history, as well as of its dialectical overcoming. Although Origin of the German Trauerspiel convincingly demonstrates that Hamlet transforms his relationship to society and its language in the course of the play by reinterpreting the contingency of historical events as manifestations of eternal providence, a closer reading of the drama shows that this reinterpretation is not, as Benjamin claims, unfolding a genuinely Christian dialectic, at the endpoint of which stands the blissful silence of assured salvation. Rather, this reinterpretation appears as the expression of an amor fati that in many respects prefigures Nietzsche’s categorical affirmation of blind necessity; Hamlet’s interpretation of the course of the world as a circulus vitiosus resembles the idea of the eternal return, embracing this figure of thought in its most hopeless and most seminal form: as an apotheosis of endless annihilation.

„compassio“, Leidenschaft, Ekstase

Expressions and gestures of mourning for the loved one have been a theme of religious art from early on. In the Middle Ages, after the discovery of the suffering Christ (“Christus patiens”), they are shown in numerous depictions of the crucifixion, especially in those of the taking down of the cross. Since the 13th century, the attitude of “compassion”, which commemorates Christ’s act of redemption and, according to theological interpretation, thereby brings about one’s own salvation, has promoted empathy with the other. After the theme had been increasingly treated aesthetically in painting, non-religious models of mourning also appeared in poetry from the 16th century onwards, whose actions were oriented towards the respective epoch-specific image of man (passion, ecstasy). The article analyses relevant poetic and musical works.

Zeitstrukturen im Gedicht

The lyric is often associated with an attempt to escape from time into stasis or eternity and is juxtaposed as atemporal to the temporal dynamics of (narrative or dramatic) plot. Resisting such common attributions, this paper develops an analytical framework that highlights the complexity and variety of temporal structures to be found in poetry. Understood as a contribution to the growing field of lyricology, the suggested framework aims to be widely applicable to poetry in general, but is here introduced and exemplified with reference to poems by Rainer Maria Rilke.

Multidirektionale Assemblage

Multidirectional Assemblage: Boris Khersonskii’s Family Archive Boris Khersonskii’s most acclaimed and translated volume of poetry Semeinyi arkhiv [Family Archive] (2003/2006) consists of semi-fictional miniatures narrating the sufferings of the members of a Southwest-Ukrainian Jewish Family in the short 20th century. The speaker’s laconic tone invites less of a trauma-studies approach to the Stalinist Great Terror and the Shoah than a media-sensitive update of the formalist focus on material devices and the determination of meaning from below. This contribution proposes to read Family Archive as an assemblage of imagined material media (photographs, letters, auction objects) which trace multidirectional vectors of commemoration. It proposes the notion of directionality for resolving the undecidability of referential and a-referential readings of quasi-documentary poetry.