Poetic Subject Research Articles

Sense and Censorship in the Islamic Republic of Iran

38 World Literature Today I n August 2011 the Perso-Iranian blogosphere exploded with news that the Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance, the governmental agency charged with overseeing and regulating literature in Iran, had denied a permit for the republication of the twelfth-century epic poem Khosrow and Shirin, by Nezami Ganjavi . Officials took offense with the classic love story’s references to the consumption of wine and unchaperoned visits between unmarried male and female characters, but above all authorities criticized the poem for the heroine’s embrace of a male body. That the body belonged to her dead husband was apparently less consequential than the fact that Nezami dared to cast the uninhibited experiences of sense and affect into Persian verse. Simin Behbahani, the country’s foremost poet today, identified in this decision a twisted sense of pleasure and the government’s own sexual anxiety and guilt. She unabashedly claimed, “In this country, they take a young, poor boy to prison and rape him there. . . . Is it possible that those able to rape such an innocent and fragile creature can also think one would derive pleasure from embracing a dead body?”1 The implication of the censorship of Nezami ’s text for writers currently working in Iran is clear. These restrictions highlight the fact that no author, even a master, is spared the wild rounds of censorship, and no text, even a classic, is exempt from the ministry’s black marker. The epic of Khosrow and Shirin is above all a love story, considered by many to be the greatest love story in the millennium-old Persian literary tradition. That the ministry chose to make an example of this particular work is telling and reveals the Islamic Republic’s anxiety about love. Representations of love challenge the government’s role as moral compass, and the notion of love threatens the very existence of the Islamic Republic, which established itself on war and violence and continues to maintain itself by remembering and above Khusraw Discovers Shirin Bathing, From Pictorial Cycle of Eight Poetic Subjects, mid-18th century. Oil on canvas, 36 x 35 in. (91.4 x 88.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, bequest of Irma B. Wilkinson in memory of her husband, Charles K. Wilkinson, 1997.108.7 Sense and Censorship in the Islamic Republic of Iran Blake Atwood special section May–june 2012 39 memorializing mistrust and hatred. In Ahmadinejad ’s Iran, literary love provides an alternative, a powerful and subversive tool that simultaneously challenges and underscores the unyielding absurdity of censorship. The decision regarding Khosrow and Shirin marked the culmination of a literary publishing crisis that began in 2005 with the election of conservative hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president. At that time, Hossein Saffar-Harandi , newly appointed minister of Islamic culture and guidance, announced that all previously published books would have to renew their publication permits. This new policy was a clear attack on the moderate cultural atmosphere fostered by Mohammad Khatami, Ahmadinejad’s predecessor who served as president between 1997 and 2005 and enabled a limited revival of literature and publishing in Iran. However, the new policies under Ahmadinejad meant that the works of that revival were subject to new standards of scrutiny and would likely be removed from bookshelves. Over the past six years, important modern works of Persian literature like Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl and Ebrahim Golestan’s The Cock have been denied publication, as well as masterworks of world literature, such as Dostoevsky’s The Gambler, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and García Márquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores. Officials in Ahmadinejad’s administration insist that the government does not participate in censorship practices, and in 2008 the deputy minister of cultural affairs, Mohsen Parviz, stated that “the prepublication inspection of books . . . has nothing to do with censorship.” His distinction between censorship and inspection here is significant . Censorship, sānsur, is likened to a crime; Parviz, in the same statement, claimed, “There are some people who . . . accuse us [the ministry] of censorship.” Censorship, he maintained, is something employed by “oppressive regimes,” like the Pahlavi monarchy.2 On the other hand, inspection , or momayyezi, is essential for “the...

Dickinson’s Delight

Although Dickinson’s writings explore a variety of affects and psychological states, she is often seen as a poet of pain, lack, and despair. By contrast, this essay argues that Dickinson views delight as the primary affect that creates the basis for all other feelings. Throughout her career Dickinson tests the expressive and representational limits of language against an excess of happiness, and she meditates on happiness when it eludes her. Emmanuel Levinas’s idea that selfhood originates in happiness helps to elucidate both the importance of delight in Dickinson’s poetry and Dickinson’s insistence that poetic subjectivity originates in amplitude rather than lack. Her early poems of delight reveal a subjectivity happily immersed in the elemental world, secure in its happiness, drawing strength from the most basic, physical level of being. This happy, empowered subjectivity never entirely disappears from Dickinson’s poetry. While scholars of female sentimentalism have demonstrated that physical pain offers nineteenth-century American women a culturally acceptable opportunity for embodiment, Dickinson shows that delight provides an alternative opportunity to experience the body through sensual satisfaction. Moreover, Dickinson asserts that female creativity arises from an emotional, intellectual, and verbal abundance that demands to be expressed in language. This insistence on delight allows Dickinson to affirm female poetic subjectivity, which many of her female contemporaries found problematic.

Stripovni stil pjesničkoga subjekta u suvremenom hrvatskome pjesništvu iskustva intermedijalnosti i postintermedijalnosti

This paper deals with poetic subjects in the comic book format as presented in the media. The subject of media entity dominates the corpus of texts in intermedial and post-intermedial poetry experience. These aspects of Croatian poetry from 1968 up to the present day, whose structures are primarily determined by contacts with different media culture texts, are defined by Goran Rem. This paper explores the ways in which the media inter-mediates comic book semiotics into the poetic code of that particular part of contemporary Croatian poetry and thus determines the paradigmatic forms of the subject of media/comic book.

Blake's ‘London’: Diabolical reading and poetic place in organisational theorising

We read Blake's poem ‘London’ aimed at sensitising readers to the early nineteenth century plight of London's most vulnerable citizens. Our reading surfaces several issues relevant to organisational theorising: the role of ‘diabolical reading’ strategies in creating mental flux through textual flux; the use of visual and poetic symbolism to contest the language systems implicated in the psychic effects of institutional domination; and Blake's narrative voice as wandering Bard, which places the poetic body at the centre of responding to spatial practices of the city. We argue Blake's art still inspires because it haunts the reader as it continually renews itself in re-reading and so both inscribes and incorporates, making the word, flesh. Blake's philosophy also highlights the creative poetic subject ‘placed’ in their city-landscape and so provides a pathway through inscription and incorporation. Implications for organisational theory are explained.

Pessoa's Heteronymy between Linguistics and Poetics

This paper deals with three kinds of poetical nihilism the annihilation of the poetic subject in Fernando Pessoa’s heteronymic writing; the apophatic definition of the divine demiurge and its repercussion on the poet considered as a substitute of the demiurge in Paul Celan’s poetry; and the gradual disappearance of the poetical word in Edmond Jabès cycle “The Book of Questions.” It is an attempt to connect this three-fold process of annihilation with cultural-contextual (mostly linguistic) factors in the case of Pessoa; with philosophical-pragmatical principles in Paul Celan’s work, and with the poetics of the blank and silence in the case of Edmond Jabès. In spite of this compartamentalization, some overlapping between the nihilist paradigms may occur: Jabès occasionally indulges in a kind of parodic heteronymy, whereas Pessoa’s subjective nihilism reaches an objective dimension through a metaphoric equation between the void of the poetical Self and the non-existence of the Book.

Spenser and the Matter of Poetry

Edmund Spenser resisted two forms of material constraints on poets: their reliance on historical circumstance for poetic subjects (or “matter”), and their reliance on patrons for material support. This article uses three poems that comment on these constraints to argue that Spenser used the mode of complaint to address the generic decorum of occasional texts, or poets’ choices of genres to suit their social and historical circumstances: “The Tears of the Muses,” “The Ruins of Time,” and the October eclogue from The Shepheardes Calender.

Sobre la dificultad de ser Carolina Coronado: contemplación y praxis fenomenológica

Este ensayo ofrece una aproximacion a un grupo de poemas tempranos escritos por Coronado en los años 40. Motivado por la aparente dificultad de trascender un marco analitico de polarizaciones entre, por ejemplo, represion y libertad, masculino y femenino, etc., el ensayo enfoca la «contemplacion» empleada por la poeta para profundizar cuestiones de la naturaleza del conocimiento mismo. El analisis de las funciones de tres nucleos semánticos –«amor,» «cantar» y «espíritus»– por medio de los cuales la voz poética de Coronado se concentra en el fenómeno (para decirlo así) de la propia presencia, revela evidencia de una «praxis fenomenológica» llevada a cabo por Coronado: esto es, la indagación, llevada a cabo por el yo poético de Coronado, acerca de la complejidad de la experiencia vivida; y a la voz del sujeto discursivo que reflexiona sobre las implicaciones del fenómeno de ser dentro, y a través, de marcos temporales. Estos tres nucleos semanticos le permiten al poeta indagar en la propia existencia humana vivida como sintesis en desarrollo (Alcoff). Un ejercicio en el cual el sujeto poético, enmarañado en lo que Merleau-Ponty elaborara como «el mundo de la carne», se empodera para articular la complejidad inherente en cualquier historia personal del «cuerpo fenomenal».

Nihilism and the Renovation of the Poetic Subject in Lee,Hyeong-gi's Poems - focused on the first three collections -

Nihilism and the Renovation of the Poetic Subject in Lee,Hyeong-gi's Poems - focused on the first three collections -

Translation, rewriting and the marginal city in Geraldine Monk's Escafeld Hangings

Geraldine Monk's 2005 poetry collection Escafeld Hangings presents the city of Sheffield via a reworking of letters and textual fragments by Mary Queen of Scots and other sources. This article explores a set of connections between Monk's approach to language and her representation of city space. Looking at the city as a site of encounter between different languages, I argue that Monk's work uses forms of translation to reconfigure relationships between place and language, addressing both constructions of nationhood and the homogenizing effects of English as a global language by focusing on locality, heterogeneity and diachronic variation. I show firstly how her interrogation of proper nouns becomes a means of questioning the structures that define the city and its relationships of class and gender, and secondly how the transpositions between texts by Mary Queen of Scots and Monk's versions of them simultaneously evoke and displace the poetic subject, presenting the city as haunted by its margins.

Charlotte Smith’s Poetry as Sentimental Discourse

IN THE FIELD OF ROMANTIC SCHOLARSHIP CHARLOTTE SMITH'S POETRY HAS in recent years come to be seen as one of most paradigmatic literary sources revealing artistic constructedness of gender. A lot of critical attention has been paid to gender roles and meanings inscribed in her poetry in ways that not only illuminate their textuality but also display how modern critics read gender into Romantic texts, thereby contributing to ongoing revision of established norms of canonicity and tradition. In addition to influence she had on first male Romantics, notably Wordsworth and Coleridge, (1) Smith's enormous importance for literary history and criticism today seems to lie chiefly in deconstructive potential of her work as detected by scholars exploring gendered and generic constructions of subjectivity and poetic identity in Romantic lyric. (2) Stuart Curran maintains that Charlotte Smith was first poet in England whom in retrospect would call Romantic. (3) It can be added that Smith is major poet whose work reveals how deeply and inextricably Romantic tradition is rooted in sentimental. Embodying fusions and hybridizations of what modem literary criticism has come to differentiate as sentimental and Romantic traditions, Smith's poetry not only illustrates their common ground, but also their differential qualities with respect to each other, which, considering their continuity, should be reassessed under categories of sentimental and sublime. As Stephen Behrendt writes, we might consider to what extent Romanticism might fruitfully be delineated by ways in which writers and citizens alike position themselves, at various points in period, in relation to an axis whose poles are Sentimental and Sublime. (4) Against some readings that interpret Smith's poetic self in terms of an absence or failure, not only of sublime but also of subjectivity, I would suggest that her poetry inscribes a poetic subjectivity that is more a positive writing of sentimental than a default of sublime. In his influential article I Altered Curran writes with reference to women poets of Romantic period, including Smith: The humanitarianism of Dissenting tradition makes women poets sympathetic to distress and victimization, but void at center of should alert us to a profound awareness among these poets of being themselves dispossessed, figured through details they do not control, uniting an unstructurable longing of with hard-earned of thingness. Curran's comment seems to carry phenomenological and psycho-social meanings arbitrarily transposed onto actual, aesthetic structure of poetry, and my argument will be implicitly contesting this through Bakhtinian notion of genre as a socio-aesthetic category. (5) I will try to show that consciousness of dispossession and the longing of sensibility inscribed especially in Elegiac Sonnets are deliberately and deftly structured mainly in accordance with generic conventions of literature of sensibility. And sense of Curran attributes to Smith (along with other women poets of period) cannot be located in her poetry insofar as is a discursive mode of subjectivity, and even more fundamentally, insofar as all authorial discourse about self in its relation to others and world is an active enactment of subjectivity in Bakhtinian sense. Karen Weisman also attributes thingness to Smith's poetic self in her sonnets by describing it as perhaps no more animate than hapless Lucy whose death Wordsworth is hauntingly to mourn. (6) Al though Curran defines Smith's poetry as one of sensibility, his comment as well as Weisman's seems to attribute subjectivity only to Romantic/ sublime, and quite arbitrarily denies sentimental's access to subjectivity as well as its capacity for artistic self-possession and mastery. …

'THIS LAST FAREWELL TO COOKE-HAM HERE I GIVE': THE POLITICS OF HOME AND NONHOME IN AEMILIA LANYER'S 'THE DESCRIPTION OF COOKE-HAM'

This article examines some of the potentially feminist dimensions to Aemilia Lanyer's poetic narrative and her critique of patronage and social inequalities by paying particular attention to the politics of home and nonhome in ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’. More specifically, it argues that the poet's ambivalent attitude towards Margaret and Anne Clifford and her legitimization of her poetic subjectivity are shaped by her mapping of what Theano Terkenli refers to in her critical discussion, ‘Home As A Region’, as ‘the dialectical relationship between home and nonhome’: this may be detected to lurk beneath the surface of the poem, a relationship that both forces and enables the poet to establish her gendered, social, and artistic identity in textual terms. Lanyer presents home, the lived experience of sharing Cookeham with the Cliffords, as a construct of memory which may be seen to have been formulated from the textual perspective of ‘nonhome’ in the aftermath of her departure from the Clifford estate. Finally, this article treats the poet's conviction that her true home is the text of her poem, since it is through poetry that Lanyer proposes a haven in which self-expression and spiritual growth are nurtured. Thus, although she may be materially dispossessed, she will never be rendered spiritually homeless.

Cognitive Change and Media Ontological Significance in the Process of Poetic Transformation of Visual Grammar - Focusing on How the Perception of the Poetic Subject -

Cognitive Change and Media Ontological Significance in the Process of Poetic Transformation of Visual Grammar - Focusing on How the Perception of the Poetic Subject -

Creating Poetic Subjectivity in Mar�a Zambrano and Jos� Lezama Lima

Creating Poetic Subjectivity in María Zambrano and José Lezama Lima Tania Gentic In a 2007 article published in a special issue of the journal Cultural Studies, devoted to elaborating a new "decolonial" approach to knowledge, Aníbal Quijano argues that postcolonial hegemony is rooted in the perceived relationship between self and other that is the cornerstone of Western post-Enlightenment thought. In the same issue, Arturo Escobar goes on to say that one possible challenge to this hegemony would be a reformulation of Western epistemology through the recuperation of "worlds and knowledges otherwise." Presumably such a project would entail, at least within the realm of Hispanic letters and history, a recuperation of indigenous, non-Western modes of thought. Yet in order for such a project to effectively break down the imposed (and, decolonial theorists aver, intimately linked) systems of coloniality and modernity, I would stress that attention must be paid to how "worlds and knowledges otherwise" would be put into dialogue with the established Western epistemologies with which we continue to frame our theoretical discussions of literature. This essay takes a small step in that direction by studying how a similar breaking down of traditional structures of thought might occur from within the very rational tradition that spawned the theory and practice of postcoloniality, by studying the poetic theories of Spanish philosopher-cum-mystic María Zambrano (1904–1991) and Cuban poet-philosopher José Lezama Lima (1910–1976). One a woman writer in exile after the Spanish Civil War, the other a reclusive, voracious reader and poet who only once left the island of Cuba, both form part of the canon of Spanish-language literature but also occupy the outer margins of it. Both also formulate theories of poetic aesthetics that present an alternative conception of subjectivity to that traditionally posed by rational philosophical structures rooted in ideology, statehood, or other forms of Western epistemology. Finally, although both writers' theories are necessarily products of the Cartesian notion of subjectivity that grounds Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought, they also strive to break through it by thinking poetry, affect, and subjectivity together, challenging the self-other dichotomy in the process. In this article, I seek to make connections between José Lezama Lima's "poetic system" and the "poetic reason" of María Zambrano that both conceptually preceded [End Page 173] and was influenced by it.1 More specifically, I consider how they ground their approaches in metaphors of space that call into question the geographical limitations of nation and state, allowing us to link their questioning of the self-other dichotomy to the postcolonial relationships that exist between state, nation, and subject. I will argue here that reading their poetic theories together as a model of Transatlantic movement, rather than stasis, may permit us to heed Quijano's and Escobar's calls to destabilize Western epistemologies of power by finding alternative ways of figuring knowledge and, in this case, the concepts of selfhood that derive from it. My analysis will focus primarily on Zambrano's works "La reforma del entendimiento español" (1937), "La metáfora del corazón" (1941), and "La Cuba secreta" (1948). For Lezama, I draw mainly from his essays "Introducción a un sistema poético" and La expresión americana, published in 1954 and 1957, respectively. I also put these works into dialogue with the concepts of "deterritorialization" and "nomadism" formulated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their seminal work A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Just one aspect of Lezama's extensive, dense, and complex work is the "poetic system" he elaborated in bits and pieces throughout his oeuvre.2 The texts that most directly address this system include his best-known novel Paradiso (1966) and its unfinished sequel Oppiano Licario (1977), poetry from "Muerte de Narciso" (1937) to the posthumous collection Fragmentos a su imán (1978), and disparate essays such as "Coloquio con Juan Ramón Jiménez" (1937), "Introducción aun sistema poético"(1954), the series of essays La expresión americana (1957), "Confluencias" (1968), and "Introducción a los vasos órficos" (1971), among others. Given the contradictions bound to arise in a work of such breadth, Lezama's poetic...

Interperformative Relationships in Ingrian Oral Poetry

The aim of this article is twofold: to introduce the Ingrian poetic singing culture, which is often referred to when discussing Kalevala-metric poetry, and to discuss aspects of performance and intertextuality. The central point here is to highlight that the meanings of a song are created on the various levels of performance; not only is the text itself worth studying, but likewise the other performance features, such as musical structures, singing conventions, and performance situations warrant analysis. After referring to the most central theoretical thoughts and concepts, I will introduce the geographical area and then proceed to a general portrait of Ingrian Kalevalametric poetry with its typical contexts and conventions of use. As case studies, I will first discuss the interperformative relationships and situational stylistics of West Ingrian swinging songs3 and lullabies, and then focus on the various uses of one poetic theme, The Sad Widow. With this general introduction of Ingrian oral poetry and the treatment of some particular cases, I hope to draw a picture of some aspects of situational variation and referentiality in performance.

Variance analysis

PurposeThis poem aims to use the language of accounting and auditing to examine how we deal with the loss of a loved one. It also aims to juxtapose the vocabulary of a budgeting seminar with the world outside, and the way the “you” of the poem deals with his grief on the first anniversary of his father's death.Design/methodology/approachThis is a free verse poem that uses longish lines of long, heavily punctuated sentences to reflect the slow passage of time in a budgeting seminar, and the waste of the first day of spring, particularly when we consider mortality. The interior description and language counterbalances the activity and brightness of the world outside. The poem deliberately references Naming of Parts by Henry Reed, on the futility of army exercises on a beautiful spring day. It is designed to end with hopefulness.FindingsThe poem uses a newly encountered vocabulary to connect frustration at being cooped up and a partner's grieving. Auditing terminology combines with concrete images of the spring world to convey the movement, growth and vitality outside the room.Research limitations/implicationsIt is possible to mould the language of accountancy into a poem about spring and about grief.Originality/valueThe poem uses accounting jargon, which seems at first disconnected with the subject matter, to emphasise and underscore the timeless poetic theme of mortality.

Beyond the Cheated Eye: Dickinson's Lyric Sociality

Ryan Cull, "Beyond the Cheated Eye: Dickinson's Lyric Sociality" (pp. 38–64) During the past generation, Dickinson scholarship has shown how historicist and printculture methodologies can illuminate the social nexus of even a notoriously reticent figure. It has also had a broader impact on how we think about lyric poetry in general. For Emily Dickinson's experiments with dual authorship, hybrid-collage forms, and the blurring of stylistic and formal lines between poem and letter indicate the social embeddedness of what critics often still consider a private genre. This essay blends these two lines of thought in order to consider the lyric (and here, especially, Dickinson's lyrics) not only as a socio-historically embedded form but also as a form that may have application to our theorizing of the social. The essay argues that in a sequence of poems and letters in the period from 1862 to 1863 Dickinson identifies a possessiveness at the heart of the lyrical subjectivity that poisons social relations and stands as the most pervasive legacy of Romanticism. The essay then shows how Dickinson criticism, which can serve as a microcosm of critical trends in general, critiques but never casts aside this post-Romantic subjectivity that still limits our social theorizing. Then it shows how Dickinson seeks to do just this, to present within her lyrics an alternative poetic subjectivity that makes possible a revolutionary, pacifistic (though not passive) form of social relation.

Mind's world: imagination and subjectivity from Descartes to Romanticism

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Rhetoric: Contexts of ImaginationAristotle, Phantasia, and the Problem of Epistemology Plato, the Neoplatonists, and the Vagaries of the Sublunar WorldPhantasia and Ecstatic Knowledge More Skillful Artist than Imitation 2. Dreams, Doubts, and Evil Demons: Descartes and ImaginationMeditatio Prima: Certainty, the Cogito, and ImaginationImagination in the RulesMeditatio Secunda: The World of the CogitoDescartes, Montaigne, and Pascal Analogies and EnthusiasmExcogitations: Fabulating the Cogito 3. The Reasonable Imagination: Immanuel Kant's Critical PhilosophyImagination in the Limits of Pure Reason Dreamers and Madmen: Imagination in AnthropologyNatural Art and Sublime Madness: Imagination in the Critique of Judgment 4. The Highest Point of Philosophy: Fichte's Reimagining of the Kantian System The Logics of Positing: Intellectual Intuition and the Absolute Subject Ecstasy, Inspired Communication, and Philosophical Genius Light, Dusk, and Darkness: The Reconciliation of OppositesThe Metaphysics of Oscillation and the Truth of Imagination Reason's Fixations: Arresting Imagination 5. A System without Foundations: Poetic Subjectivity in Friedrich von Hardenberg's Ordo InversusA System without Foundations Fantasy and the Body 6. Divine Law and Abject Subjectivity: Coleridge and the Double Knowledge of Imagination Divine Imagination The Abyss of the Empirical Self Coda: Imagining Ideology Conclusions Notes Bibliography Index

Wordsworth and Nigerian Poetry: Niyi Osundare as a Case in Point

This paper raises the question of the place of “romantic theory” in African literature. It notably interrogates the ideas that lie behind Wordsworth’s theories about poetic subjects and poetic language, as well as their place and meaning in an African setting. The essay examines Osundare’s statements on the art of poetry and considers the (af)filiation with Wordsworth’s stances. It focuses on the resonances between Osundare’s Songs of the Market Place and A Nib in the Pond, among other collections, and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, notably in the depiction of rustic subjects and rustic diction. The paper argues that Osundare portrays ordinary subjects, but does not systematically deploy ordinary language.

Search for the Impersonal ‘We’ in “Gerontion”: A Link toward The Waste Land

“Gerontion” chronologically is the last poem in Poems, but Eliot placed it in the beginning of the volume. With the dramatic monologue as its form, the poem reminds of the earlier dramatic monologues in the Prufrock volume, but is bounded with satirical poems. Viewed from a century’s distance, dramatic monologue dominates the three major phases of Eliot’s early years: Prufrock (1917), Poems (1920), and The Waste Land (1922). While The Waste Land is definitely the most comprehensive and cumulative, “Gerontion,” originally meant to be a prelude to the longer poem, serves as an important link, binding the first two and predicting the third in form and technique. More importantly, “Gerontion” also links the phases in terms of subject matter. Since Eliot’s major reason for the technical shift in the quatrain poems is the more personal nature of his poetic subject toward the end of 1910s, his prime struggle was to find an impersonal ‘we’—the most comprehensive voice and point of view that both involves and transcends his own and others’ personal points of view and voices—with the help of impersonal techniques. “Gerontion,” as the result of this struggle, is a fusion of Prufrock and Poems both in technique and subject matter, restoring the dramatic monologue and developing the transformed I-You relation in the more comprehensive ‘we,’ though the poet is yet to explore its comprehensiveness further in The Waste Land.

Lyrical Redefinitions of Heimat in Mariella Mehr'sNachrichten aus dem ExilandWiderwelten

Examining selected poems from Mariella Mehr's volumesNachrichten aus dem Exil(1998) andWiderwelten(2001), this article explores the ways that the Swiss writer Mehr refigures the notion of Heimat and its relationship to language. Tracing three key sources that supply the vocabulary and concepts within Mehr's lyrical treatment of Heimat—her own life experiences of persecution and rootlessness in postwar Switzerland, received notions of Heimat from Germanic culture, as well as the minority Yenish culture from which Mehr was forcibly estranged—this paper argues that Mehr turns to poetry to decouple Heimat from a geographically fixed, exclusionary concept, expanding it to capture complex intercultural experiences. Moreover, I attempt to unravel the paradox latent in Mehr's work, wherein the poetic subject's predominantly unsatisfied struggle for home must be reconciled with Mehr's own assertion of language's decisive role in achieving Heimat.