TY  - CHAP
A1  - Castore, Antonio
T1  - The staircase wit or The poetic idiomaticity of Herta Müller's prose
T2  - Untying the mother tongue / ed. by Antonio Castore and Federico Dal Bo ; Cultural Inquiry ; 26
N2  - 'The Staircase Wit; or, The Poetic Idiomaticity of Herta Müller's Prose' explores idioms and 'Sprachbilder' as poetic views of the mother tongue. This exploration involves a special focus on Müller's Nobel lecture, considered as both a compendium and an enactment of her meditations on language, on the nature of writing, and on the creative process. While Müller frequently employs idioms in her articles, lectures, and novel titles, she never uses them in a superficial way or as a mere reproduction of common or daily speech. Rather, as this essay argues, idioms in Müller's prose are indicative of her attitude toward language and toward the mother tongue in general. In the Nobel lecture as well as elsewhere, idioms serve a dual, occasionally conflicting purpose, combining the need for the 'singularity' of aesthetic experience with the search for a new kind of 'conventionality'.
KW  - Müller, Herta
KW  - Sprache
KW  - Muttersprache
KW  - Phraseologie
KW  - Idioms
KW  - Mother tongue
Y1  - 2023
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/75601
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-756014
UR  - https://press.ici-berlin.org/doi/10.37050/ci-26/castore_the-staircase-wit.pdf
SN  - 978-3-96558-050-3
SN  - 978-3-96558-051-0
SN  - 978-3-96558-049-7
SN  - 2627-731X
SP  - 181
EP  - 110
PB  - ICI Press
CY  - Berlin
ER  -