Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editor's Preface
- Introduction: Broch, Our Contemporary
- I. Hermann Broch: The Critic
- II. Hermann Broch: The Novelist and Dramatist
- Inscriptions of Power: Broch's Narratives of History in Die Schlafwandler
- The German Colonial Aftermath: Broch's 1903. Esch oder die Anarchie
- Neither Sane nor Insane: Ernst Kretschmer's Influence on Broch's Early Novels
- Non-Contemporaneity of the Contemporaneous: Broch's Novel Die Verzauberung
- “Great Theater” and “Soap Bubbles”: Broch the Dramatist
- A Farewell to Art: Poetic Reflection in Broch's Der Tod des Vergil
- Poetry as Perjury: The End of Art in Broch's Der Tod des Vergil and Celan's Atemwende
- “Beyond Words”: The Translation of Broch's Der Tod des Vergil by Jean Starr Untermeyer
- Between Guilt and Fall: Broch's Die Schuldlosen
- Broch Reception in Japan: Shin'ichiro Nakamura and Die Schuldlosen
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index of Broch's Works
- Index of Names
Poetry as Perjury: The End of Art in Broch's Der Tod des Vergil and Celan's Atemwende
from II. Hermann Broch: The Novelist and Dramatist
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editor's Preface
- Introduction: Broch, Our Contemporary
- I. Hermann Broch: The Critic
- II. Hermann Broch: The Novelist and Dramatist
- Inscriptions of Power: Broch's Narratives of History in Die Schlafwandler
- The German Colonial Aftermath: Broch's 1903. Esch oder die Anarchie
- Neither Sane nor Insane: Ernst Kretschmer's Influence on Broch's Early Novels
- Non-Contemporaneity of the Contemporaneous: Broch's Novel Die Verzauberung
- “Great Theater” and “Soap Bubbles”: Broch the Dramatist
- A Farewell to Art: Poetic Reflection in Broch's Der Tod des Vergil
- Poetry as Perjury: The End of Art in Broch's Der Tod des Vergil and Celan's Atemwende
- “Beyond Words”: The Translation of Broch's Der Tod des Vergil by Jean Starr Untermeyer
- Between Guilt and Fall: Broch's Die Schuldlosen
- Broch Reception in Japan: Shin'ichiro Nakamura and Die Schuldlosen
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index of Broch's Works
- Index of Names
Summary
A Delayed Verdict?
IF IT HAS BEEN THE FATE OF POETRY to be defeated, marginalized, and lorded over by philosophy, we could map the history of modernist literature between two decrees against art — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's thesis that art works have lost their power and capacity to fulfill humanity's highest needs and Theodor Adorno's pronouncement that it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz. It is of course between the time of these two proclamations that art in Europe embarked upon a period of unprecedented formal innovation and that poetry in particular shattered received conventions of rhetoric and syntax. Hegel's idea of the end of art is less a categorical denunciation of art-works for posing a threat to the notion of truth and the good life, the view that underpins Socrates' proposal in Plato's Politeia to banish the poets from the just state, than the assertion of the primacy of speculative reason in grasping the highest stages of historical consciousness. Adorno's stricture, on the other hand, stands as an ethical injunction. For it is the moral legitimacy of art that is now at stake — its very right to exist in the wake of the barbarism of war and genocide. If art does come to an end, it is because it has been radically outbid by the devastations of history. Measured against the reality of suffering, art is both inadequate and incapable of giving voice to horror and agony, or is complicit in it.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Hermann Broch, Visionary in ExileThe 2001 Yale Symposium, pp. 201 - 216Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2003