Ethical Tendencies: Poetic Attention in the Wake of the Holocaust

This dissertation examines the ways in which poetic writing in the wake of the Nazi genocide orients readers toward responsiveness to the past and responsibility in the present through formal strategies. Poetry, in its rhythms, sensory texture, and signifying structure is always a site where our usual patterns of perception can be altered. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, I argue, this formal resource is mobilized to affect the ethically pertinent experience of what we tend to and how we do so. Taking the poetry of Paul Celan as a point of departure, I engage in dialogue with the poetic works of Dan Pagis, Charlotte Delbo, May Ayim, and Max Czollek, crossing different linguistic and historic contexts. I show how, in the writing of these authors, formal elements such as fragmentation, semantic indeterminacy, or multilingualism affect the experience of reading. Poetic form, in this context, generates modes of attention that are receptive and keenly dialogic, countering thereby the violent logic of “concentration” particular to the universe of the camps. I call these modes “ethical tendencies,” and I focus on four in particular: susceptibility, patience, hesitation, and wakefulness. By developing an account of the modes of attention compelled by poetic writing after the Nazi genocide, this project opens up the doors for a new perspective on “poetry after Auschwitz.” It shifts the long-held focus on the past’s “unspeakability” toward the ways in which poetry of this historical moment can draw readers into ethical ways of bearing with the past and relating to the present./nThe four chapters of the dissertation each focus on one “ethical tendency.” Chapter One, “Susceptibility,” develops a reading of Celan’s long poem “Engführung,” which is often considered a turning point in Celan’s work, away from the metaphoric quality of his earlier poetry toward a less “accessible” aesthetic. Against this, I suggest that the poem—precisely through its form—seeks to generate a mode of reading and remembering that is defined by susceptibility toward the past in the present: By attuning the reader to its breath rhythm, it privileges a mode of being “with” the poem and its history over the certainty of conclusive interpretation. Chapter Two, “Patience,” brings Celan into dialogue with the Hebrew-language poet Dan Pagis. In the writing of both these poets, formal elements such as semantic indeterminacy and perspectival shifts generate a feeling of difficulty and disorientation. I show how the very formal elements that contribute to this sense of “difficulty” draw readers into a process of tarrying with the text. Formal difficulty, from this perspective, can be generative of a practice of patience whose ethical implication lies in the reader’s ongoing engagement with the text—and its history. In Chapter Three, “Hesitation,” I show how poetic strategies of delay and repetition can change habituated forms of perception. The first part of this chapter focuses on poetic prose by Charlotte Delbo, which highlights the complexities of ethical seeing under the specific regime of attention perpetuated by the concentration camps, all while reorganizing the field of the visible for the reader—potentially transforming existing habits of seeing. The second part of the chapter focuses on the rhetorical strategies of Celan’s The Meridian to show how the speech’s errant, delaying—hesitating—rhythm unfolds a critical potential in the moment of its performance, challenging the audience to listen attentively. Chapter Four, “Wakefulness,” moves forward in time, from the 1960s and 1970s to the writing of Afro-German poet May Ayim in the 1990s and the work of contemporary German-Jewish poet Max Czollek in the late 2010s to trace the ethical tendencies of their poetry. Bringing the writing of these two authors into dialogue with Celan, I show how poetry formally engenders “wakefulness,” a mode of attention, which cultivates a vigilance toward present continuities of past violence from within a capacious memory that sees history not as a set of isolated events but as a deeply entangled phenomenon. I end with a coda that reflects on the labor of reading and remembering—of tending to history. It is a labor which, if we are to take the credo “never forget” seriously, will remain a task forever.

Advisor: Butler, Judith