Abstract
Wilhelm Deinert's Silser Brunnenbuch (1999) attempts to (re)create the pastoral, a genre that has been depreciated since Romanticism for its escapism and lack of reference to the real world. The first part of Brunnenbuch posits a firm semiotic link between ontology (symbolized by water) and the language of poetry, thus grounding the pastoral in material reality. The second half seems to undermine this framework but actually strengthens it. Deinert anticipates nominalistic doubts by explicitly integrating them into his work. Referring to texts by Nietzsche and Hermann Hesse and conflating their intertextual implications, he creates an “unassailable ambivalence” for his new pastoral that makes it immune to the charge of escapist fictitiousness. Deinert turns the pastoral into a means for a constructivist recognition of the world.
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