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As a postmodern detective novel, "City of Glass" circles around its genre, deconstructing topical notions such as the 'case' and citing the commonplace language of hardboiled detectives as well as Poe's archetypical Dupin. Furthermore, the novel also refers to completely different texts and genres: Milton's Christian epic "Paradise Lost", for example, is allotted an important position in the 6th chapter with its speculations about a regaining of the Adamic language. The allusions to the puritan poet Milton exemplifies how Auster synthesizes a postmodern inquiry into genre and language with references to "premodern moral questions", highlighting interesting analogies between post- and premodern practices of reading and writing. An even more astonishing example are the subtle references to Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe", the best-selling puritan "spiritual autobiography" about the survival of a castaway on a remote Caribbean island, which have not yet been accorded scholarly attention. Although they don't seem to be of much significance at first sight, they, too, build on the relationship between puritan and postmodern reading and writing. In this paper, Joachim Harst unfolds the many parallels between Auster's and Defoe's first novels and shows how Auster reads "Robinson Crusoe" as an exemplary figure for existential solitude and artistic creativity. Auster's postmodern view on Defoe's novel also helps to highlight fissures in Robinson's seemingly complete "selfcomposure" via autobiography, while the colonial aspects of Defoe's novel resonate with Auster's postcolonial critique of America's puritan origins. Harst concludes with a glance at Auster's references to "Robinson Crusoe" in his other early works, especially his autofictional text "Invention of Solitude", in which he depicts the artist as "shipwreck[ed] in the heart of the city" and uses "Robinson Crusoe" to construct a biographical mythology aiming at creative authorship.
This article reads Fred Moten's collection "B Jenkins" as literalizing the poetic appeal to the mother tongue to reveal its mediated essence. Approaching its first and last poems in terms of Friedrich Kittler's techno-psychological history of the family casts Moten's detuning of natural language in terms of cultural mastery streaked with affirmative disfluency. With the 'cant', slang slides towards a broader awareness of the limits of knowledge. There, language may emerge for perceiving the role of the technological mother tongue in our postnational age.
The essay focusses on how Woolf's quest for a 'universal' language of the mind can be read as redefining and even reinventing the notion of mother tongue. In particular, "The Waves" offers a reconfiguration of the process of language acquisition that symbolically reverses its linear development. Woolf's stress on a dynamic, ever-moving conception of language, her connection with Coleridge's perspectives on language, and her view of ancient Greek as an ideal lost language reveal her questioning of the idea of a culturally homogeneous and monolithic language. The notion of mother tongue is thus reconfigured by the writer in terms of a dreamed and imagined ideal language combining familiarity and foreignness, reality and ideality, exactness and the perpetual deferral of meaning.