Thresholds, Encounters: Paul Celan and the Claim of Philology

Paul Celan’s works dwell on the threshold between the extremes of poetic expression and philosophical reflection. The divergent literary and critical idioms that have marked Celan’s writing--and that Celan’s writing has come to mark for others (Hamacher, Derrida, Szondi)--thus call for a new philology. This philology cannot be situated within presupposed genres or fields but rather explores the ways in which poetic and philosophical ambitions meet in texts by, and on, Celan. The first part of Thresholds, Encounters (＂Ex-posing the Poem＂) speaks to issues of history, ecology, and aurality; the second part (＂Language Dislodged＂) delves into Celan’s articulations of encounter, positionality, and translation. Throughout, contributors probe the consequences of Celan’s poetry for thinking and writing, while inviting readers from different disciplinary spaces to further pace out the liminal zones opened by his oeuvre.

Kristina Mendicino is Associate Professor of German Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Announcements: On Novelty and Passive Voices (On the Subject of Phenomenology and Other Figures of Speech), both published by SUNY Press. Dominik Zechner is Assistant Professor of German at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.