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An Odyssey for Our Time
Barbara Köhler’s Niemands Frau
Series: - German Monitor, Volume: 78
- German Monitor, Volume: 78
Volume Editor:
In her 2007 poem cycle Niemands Frau, Barbara Köhler returns to Homer’s Odyssey, not to retell it, but to take up some of the threads it has woven into the cultural tradition of the West – and to unravel them, just as Penelope, the wife of the hero who called himself Nobody, unravelled each night the web she re-wove by day. Köhler’s return to the Odyssey takes place under the sign of a grammatical shift, from ‘er’ to ‘sie’, from the singular hero to a plurality of female voices – Nausicaa, Circe, Calypso, Ino Leucothea, Helen and Penelope herself – with implications for thinking about identity, power and knowledge, about gender and relationality, but also about the corporeality and multivocality which underlies the ‘virtual reality’ of the printed text.
The eight essays in this volume explore Köhler’s iridescent poem cycle from a variety of different angles: its context in contemporary German refigurations of the classical; its engagement with Homer and the classical tradition; its contribution to feminist philosophy of the subject and a female ‘dialectic of enlightenment’; its incorporation of the voices of poetic predecessors; and the surprising alliance it uncovers between poetry and quantum theory.
The eight essays in this volume explore Köhler’s iridescent poem cycle from a variety of different angles: its context in contemporary German refigurations of the classical; its engagement with Homer and the classical tradition; its contribution to feminist philosophy of the subject and a female ‘dialectic of enlightenment’; its incorporation of the voices of poetic predecessors; and the surprising alliance it uncovers between poetry and quantum theory.
Acknowledgements
Georgina Paul: Introduction
Karen Leeder: ‘Argo Cargo’: The Role of the Classical Past in Contemporary German Poetry
Hans Jürgen Scheuer: Polytropia. Barbara Köhlers Erkundung des Griechischen (Homer, Odyssee / Sappho, Anaktoria-Fragment)
Rebecca May Johnson: Niemands Frau as a ‘Minor Translation’ of the Odyssey from ‘er’ to ‘sie’
Rachel Jones: ‘Nocheinmal zurückkommen’: Reading Köhler with Irigaray and Cavarero
Mirjam Bitter: Transpositionen von Text, Textil und Textur. Barbara Köhlers und Rosi Braidottis Entwürfe beweglicher, aber nicht haltloser Subjektivitäten
Helmut Schmitz: The ‘nachtseite des abendlands’. Barbara Köhler’s Niemands Frau and the Dialectic of Enlightenment
Margaret Littler: Strange Loops and Quantum Turns in Barbara Köhler’s Niemands Frau
Georgina Paul: Different Voices: Other Poets in Barbara Köhler’s Niemands Frau, with a Special Study of the Significance of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
Barbara Köhler: THE MOST BEAUTIFUL
Notes on Contributors
Index
Georgina Paul: Introduction
Karen Leeder: ‘Argo Cargo’: The Role of the Classical Past in Contemporary German Poetry
Hans Jürgen Scheuer: Polytropia. Barbara Köhlers Erkundung des Griechischen (Homer, Odyssee / Sappho, Anaktoria-Fragment)
Rebecca May Johnson: Niemands Frau as a ‘Minor Translation’ of the Odyssey from ‘er’ to ‘sie’
Rachel Jones: ‘Nocheinmal zurückkommen’: Reading Köhler with Irigaray and Cavarero
Mirjam Bitter: Transpositionen von Text, Textil und Textur. Barbara Köhlers und Rosi Braidottis Entwürfe beweglicher, aber nicht haltloser Subjektivitäten
Helmut Schmitz: The ‘nachtseite des abendlands’. Barbara Köhler’s Niemands Frau and the Dialectic of Enlightenment
Margaret Littler: Strange Loops and Quantum Turns in Barbara Köhler’s Niemands Frau
Georgina Paul: Different Voices: Other Poets in Barbara Köhler’s Niemands Frau, with a Special Study of the Significance of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
Barbara Köhler: THE MOST BEAUTIFUL
Notes on Contributors
Index