Paul Celan: a rhetoric of silence.
Abstract
The thesis focusses on the suspension of Celan's poetry between
speech and silence, in particular on the way in which this suspension
functions and on the interrelations between its thematic, formal, metaphorical,
tonal and structural manifestations. As is emphasized in a
fusion like "das erschwiegene Wort" in the early programmatic poem
"Argumentum e silentio, " silence in Celan is not opposed to, but is
inherent in, poetic speech. The fundamental mediality of his poetry
engenders numerous devices of suspension, which, according to the
rhetorical modes in which they silence reference, may be divided into
three distinct but not mutually exclusive categories: unfinality, disjunction
and displacement.
The first category is defined by the avoidance of closure. Whatever
the technique employed, be it the elision of a final full stop or
an explicit self-revocation, this type of poem not only negates its
own finality, but consists of this very invalidation. The speech of the
poem is the silencing of speech. This primal suspension infuses Celan's
work with a host of correlative disjunctions. Metaphors are often radically
suspended between mutually exclusive extremes of connotation, mutually
exclusive denotations sometimes starkly juxtaposed. The opposing
terms at once define and negate each other: the essence lies in the
interstice they delimit. The third category investigated is that of
displacement, which, exemplified by the use of irony and anagrams,
involves suspension by a deviation from, rather than a negation of,
literal meaning: an element of deflection and play is to the fore.
All three categories share the basic mechanism of exploiting an
interstice between reference and rhetoric. And, the thesis ventures
finally to suggest, it is this interstice, reflected thematically in
many metaphors of mediality and constituted by a fusion, a synchronization,
of multiple grids of signification, that structures the poem;
it is silence that speaks.
Authors
Michael, Andreas James AdoCollections
- Theses [3831]