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“Your country behind the mountain, behind the year”: Insistence of an Inaccessible Alterity in Paul Celan’sPoetics

Journal Contribution - Journal Article

Alterity is a key issue in modern literature and in related disciplines such as philosophy. In ‘The Meridian’(1960) Paul Celan clearly foregrounds his poetics of otherness. He posits that “[f]or the poem, everything and everybody is a figure of this other toward which it is heading.” In this paper, Celan’s conception of alterity will be examined with regard to Levinas’s account of otherness in Existence and Existents (1947). Both men believed that poetry stands in a relation of proximity to the Other. This relationality means above all a listening to the Other, as poetry addresses the Other who made a claim on poetry. This paper seeks to underscore that Celan’s poetics principally has an ethical dimension which shows affinities with Levinas’s conception of the il y a or there is. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach, key issues such as the interconnectedness between poetry, alterity,and Being will be clarified.
Journal: LLIDS - Language Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies
ISSN: 2457-0044
Issue: 3
Volume: 3
Pages: 47 - 67
Publication year:2020
Accessibility:Open