Studia Germanistica 9
Refine
Year of publication
- 2011 (2)
Document Type
- Article (2)
Language
- German (2)
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (2)
Keywords
- Sprache (2) (remove)
The poetic language of the Nobel Prize winner Nelly Sachs has already been examined from several points of view. Nelly Sachs has often been mentioned in connection with Klopstock and Hölderlin owing to her 'high tone' (cf. e.g. Paul Hoffmann's article 'On Nelly Sachs' Pathos' from 1994).
However, even earlier than the style which Hoffmann characterized as the "seed of the concise, hermetic late style with a more moderate pathos", literary techniques other than pathetic speech can be found in the work of Nelly Sachs. In the poems 'WE ARE SO sore', 'SOMEONE COMES', 'A PUNCH' behind a hedge, there is a laconic style, far removed from all hermeticism, which is able precisely to depict the impact of the Shoah on its survivors. This style seems to be cognate with Kaschnitz's late elliptical works, Celan's "greyer language", and Bachmann's laconic poems, all from the 1960s. It is this particular style that is examined in this article.
The article deals with the analysis of linguistic structures which are used in the language of contemporary drama to intensify the expression of emotion. A corpus of four postmodern dramas was compiled for this purpose: 'Tätowierung' by Dea Loher (1992), 'Herr Kolpert' by David Gieselmann (2000), 'Schwimmen wie Hunde' by Reto Finger (2004), and 'Ein Teil der Gans' by Martin Heckmanns (2007). The article is based on the hypothesis that the emotional level of a text can be expressed via linguistic means displaying strong intensity. A theoretical justification of this hypothesis is followed by the analysis of the corpus texts.