“Herzmeere”: the Water Motif in Paul Celan’s Poetry, Time, and Question of Art and Life after Auschwitz

• Main Authors: Shih-Min Chang, 張詩敏
• Other Authors: Duncan M. Chesney
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/vd86u6

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 外國語文學研究所 === 103 === This thesis, acknowledging Celan’s role as a modernist poet who experiments with his language in matters of life and death, focuses on Celan’s endeavor to deal with the past. With the help of the water motif from Celan’s poems in three different phases, this thesis is able to observe three distinctive modes of temporality. They are the following: first, the progressive time where the past results in the present that leads into the future; second, the time that is waiting for an escape from the linear order of time, a redemption where the differentiation between past, present and future does not exist anymore; and finally, ∞/the recurrent infinite circular movement in which the past that can be regarded from a new perspective of the present and therefore returns as a new beginning in the future. Moreover, my project poses the following questions: If the event Auschwitz, a watershed of Western history, requires a different mode of thinking about the relation between philosophy, life, history and art, then what role does art play? Then more specifically, what role does Celan’s poetry play? This thesis then turns to Adorno for possible answers. Having explored some key terms in Adorno’s thinking, including the primacy of the object, reflection, the mimetic function of art and experience (notably the difference between Erfahrung and Erlebnis), the meaning of “nach Auschwitz,” the idea of Bildung, his literary criticism and finally his reflections on how to work through the past, this thesis concludes that artworks are able to preserve and pass on mediated, historical experience that forces the experiencing subject to reflect upon the past. In so doing, as indicated by the third mode of temporality in Celan’s poetry, artworks serve as reminders of the past without keeping the receiving subject entirely in the shadow of shame and guilt from the past.