Anne Duden: A Revolution of Words. Approaches to Her Fiction, Poetry and Essays by Heike Bartel , Elizabeth Boa (review)

Abstract

MLR, 99.4, 2004 1111 Anne Duden: A Revolution of Words. Approaches to her Fiction, Poetry and Essays. Ed. by Heike Bartel and Elizabeth Boa. (German Monitor, 56) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2003. ix+191pp. ?50; $50 (pbk ?22; $22). ISBN 90420 -1134-3 (pbk 90-420-1124-6). The literary quality of Anne Duden's work, which spans the last twenty years, was officiallyrecognized in July2003 when she was awarded the prestigious Heinrich B611 Prize. It is especially appropriate, then, that a book devoted to the experimental and challenging work of this author has now appeared. The book is welcome in a number of ways. It extends the range of collections of essays on individual women writers which are currently being put together with great thought and commitment. These include other German Monitor editions on Barbara Kohler and Libuse Monikova (forthcoming) and the University of Wales Press volumes on Herta Muller, Kerstin Hensel, and Esther Dischereit (the last also forthcoming). All these collections share a focus on a woman writer whose work has been extremely well received but not yet analysed in depth in a monograph in English. Like these, Anne Duden: A Revolution of Words is a collaborative work. In this case also the book has as its foundation a symposium on the author's work. The collection begins with a long poem by Duden entitled 'Herzgange', published here for the firsttime. The inclusion of work by the author illuminates the essays which follow, most specifically, in this instance, the ex? cellent introduction to the book by Elizabeth Boa. This gives the reader not only the important biographical details of Duden's life, but also an elucidation of poems in Duden's most recent work Hingegend (2001). The essays are in both English and German and cover all aspects of Duden's work. They offera range of interpretative possibilities, from the intricately detailed close readings by Georgina Paul and Juliet Wigmore to the more theoretical analyses by Margaret Littler, Stephanie Bird, and Teresa Ludden. Collections such as this complement the more general works on German women writers that are so useful not only for those Germanists engaged in research but also for the many of us who now teach women's writing at undergraduate and postgraduate level. The three contri? butions which use theory to frame Duden's work help to bridge the gap between text and theory so often encountered in this work. As Brigid Haines and Margaret Littler argue in their Contemporary Women's Writingin German: Changing theSubject (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), theory should be 'an empowering interpre? tative tool, not a daunting or exclusionary practice' (p. 10), and the essays by Littler, Bird, and Ludden use the work of (among others) Julia Kristeva, Christine Battersby, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gilles Deleuze to offerextremely interesting interpretations, in which all three concentrate on notions of subjectivity and violence. The final three contributions to the book, by Georgina Paul, Claudia Roth, and Heike Bartel, focus on poetry and put forward differing readings of the hitherto neglected poem cycle Steinschlag (1993). In all three, emphasis is placed on Duden's language, which is highly original and imaginative. For the intricacies of Duden's poetry to be fully appreciated these text- and individual word-based analyses are as important as the theoretical positions outlined above. Anne Duden is generally considered an extremely 'difficult' writer, whose work is so ambiguous that the onus of interpretation lies very much with the reader. It is therefore, as Wiebke Sievers shows, work which is also very difficultto translate in a traditional 'literal' sense. The work of translation, as of interpretation, can, however, be a positive experience, as this book clearly demonstrates. It is perhaps also worth noting that the positive experience of interpreting Duden's work is valid forboth men and women. All too often Duden is seen solely as a 'feminist' writer with nothing to say to male readers. It is thus important that the sole contribution by a male critic, Dirk Gottsche, sets Duden's lyrical prose and her essays in the context ofthe German 1112 Reviews Romantics and Modernist aesthetics. This not only brings out the musicality of Duden 's...