Dissertation
Transplanting Languages: Botanical Poetics of Paul Celan and Yoko Tawada
Concentrating on the work of Paul Celan and Yoko Tawada, my dissertation revolves around the complicated role played by plants in migrant literature in the Post-War and contemporary period. Reflecting on and engaging with the intricate dynamics of vegetative life, Celan and Tawada address such issues as uprootedness, displacement, and the transplantation of language. I argue that their concern with plant life not only touch upon certain fundamental ontological and hermeneutical questions but also offers them a refuge in language from language that has become simultaneously abusive and abused. My project contributes to the field of critical plant studies, an area of inquiry related to posthumanism and environmental studies. The broader aim of my dissertation, like that of plant studies in general, is to revise the understanding of plants solely as symbols or metaphors of the human experience, and my dissertation, in particular, shows how Celan and Tawada develop two ways of approaching plant life without the prejudice that it simply stands for stages of human development.
Concentrating on the work of Paul Celan and Yoko Tawada, my dissertation revolves around the complicated role played by plants in migrant literature in the Post-War and contemporary period. Reflecting on and engaging with the intricate dynamics of vegetative life, Celan and Tawada address such issues as uprootedness, displacement, and the transplantation of language. I argue that their concern with plant life not only touch upon certain fundamental ontological and hermeneutical questions but also offers them a refuge in language from language that has become simultaneously abusive and abused. My project contributes to the field of critical plant studies, an area of inquiry related to posthumanism and environmental studies. The broader aim of my dissertation, like that of plant studies in general, is to revise the understanding of plants solely as symbols or metaphors of the human experience, and my dissertation, in particular, shows how Celan and Tawada develop two ways of approaching plant life without the prejudice that it simply stands for stages of human development.
Book Project
Plans for Expanding the Dissertation Project
While the dissertation focuses on the work of Paul Celan and Yoko Tawada, the book project, which includes three new chapters, revolves around the complicated role played by plants in German migrant literature in the Post-War and contemporary period. The first new chapter focuses on the plant writings of Herta Müller, including her best-known fictional work, Herztier, her autobiographical and poetological essay volume Der König verneigt sich und tötet, among others. I argue that plant writing is for Müller both a testimony for the pain and suffering under the Communist regime, and the refuge in which she seeks to communicate and connect with the world. The second chapter analyzes the concept of rootedness and a migrant’s critical engagement with her surroundings in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn. The final chapter offers a survey of themes including ecocriticism, ecopoetics, and the vegetal landscape in contemporary migrant writings, which includes works of Sharon Dodua Otoo, Ilija Trojanow, and Olga Grjasnowa, among others.
While the dissertation focuses on the work of Paul Celan and Yoko Tawada, the book project, which includes three new chapters, revolves around the complicated role played by plants in German migrant literature in the Post-War and contemporary period. The first new chapter focuses on the plant writings of Herta Müller, including her best-known fictional work, Herztier, her autobiographical and poetological essay volume Der König verneigt sich und tötet, among others. I argue that plant writing is for Müller both a testimony for the pain and suffering under the Communist regime, and the refuge in which she seeks to communicate and connect with the world. The second chapter analyzes the concept of rootedness and a migrant’s critical engagement with her surroundings in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn. The final chapter offers a survey of themes including ecocriticism, ecopoetics, and the vegetal landscape in contemporary migrant writings, which includes works of Sharon Dodua Otoo, Ilija Trojanow, and Olga Grjasnowa, among others.
Future Directions
Portals
My next project is concerned with the aesthetic problem of “portals,” a literary or artistic opening that admits entrance to an alternative world, in the works of Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch. This project is developed from an article I published regarding the legend of the Chinese painter in Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” where I demonstrate that, even as Benjamin associates with this legend of an artist disappearing in his own work with the quintessence of auratic art, it is actually a function of a form of technical reproducibility that developed in East Asia and thus points the way to a consequential revision of his insights into the relation of artworks to their technical and medial conditions. The artwork that the painter walks directly into could be seen as a “portal,” and Benjamin associates it with an aesthetics problem: How does an artwork absorb its spectator? Where does art in its classical sense end, and another life begin? The question could also be posted in a different way: where does the image per se end, and it frame (or, as Derrida calls, following Kant, its paragon) begin?
While Benjamin is concerned about the artist’s contemplation, concentration, and disappearance into the painting, Bloch, who writes about the same painter’s story, focuses on what happens on the other end of the portal. He sees it as an example of art fulfilling its task as anticipatory illumination (Vor-Schein) of a better future, instead of as a bourgeois classical form of art, which only allows for contemplation and passive enjoyment. In Traces, Bloch categorizes the painter’s story, along with other stories that involve an image that admits entrance to an alternative reality, under “the motif of the door,” which reflects on the utopian function of art. His version of the portal as an aesthetic problem would be, how does the portal trope as a wish-image reflect both social realities and human dreams? Bloch’s interpretation of the portal as an entrance towards a wish-landscape can be seen in an entire subgenre of fantasy literature, namely the portal fantasy, in which the protagonist is transported from their daily routine to another world, where she finds herself in an important role. Famous examples are Alice’s rabbit hole and the wardrobe in The Chronicles of Narnia.
While Benjamin is concerned about the artist’s contemplation, concentration, and disappearance into the painting, Bloch, who writes about the same painter’s story, focuses on what happens on the other end of the portal. He sees it as an example of art fulfilling its task as anticipatory illumination (Vor-Schein) of a better future, instead of as a bourgeois classical form of art, which only allows for contemplation and passive enjoyment. In Traces, Bloch categorizes the painter’s story, along with other stories that involve an image that admits entrance to an alternative reality, under “the motif of the door,” which reflects on the utopian function of art. His version of the portal as an aesthetic problem would be, how does the portal trope as a wish-image reflect both social realities and human dreams? Bloch’s interpretation of the portal as an entrance towards a wish-landscape can be seen in an entire subgenre of fantasy literature, namely the portal fantasy, in which the protagonist is transported from their daily routine to another world, where she finds herself in an important role. Famous examples are Alice’s rabbit hole and the wardrobe in The Chronicles of Narnia.
