Wednesday 11 July 2012

Kafka and Celan on "writing as a form of prayer"

The cover of Illuminating Darkness

"'Schreiben als Form des Gebets': An Impossible Form of Apostrophe? : 'P. S' on a fragment by Kafka as adopted by Celan." My article with that impossible title is also online now (PDF, 6 MB). It appeared five years ago in the volume edited by Päivi Mehtonen, Illuminating Darkness: Approaches to Obscurity and Nothingness in Literature (Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, 2007), 187–207.

The article contains, as its most important ingredient, my reading of Celan's poem "Wirk nicht voraus", different from another discussion of the same poem in my doctoral dissertation (see below) and more detailed.