Holocaust Visions: Surrealism and Existentialism in the Poetry of Paul Celan
The gist of Samuels's study is to show how Celan uses surrealist poetic devices throughout his entire cuvre in order to convey a vision of being-in-the world which is shaped and overshadowed by his experience of the Holocaust-a vision which turns into a "universal, existentialist metaphor...
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| Published in: | Journal of English and Germanic philology 1997, Vol.96 (3), p.432-433 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Review |
| Language: | eng |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | The gist of Samuels's study is to show how Celan uses surrealist poetic devices throughout his entire cuvre in order to convey a vision of being-in-the world which is shaped and overshadowed by his experience of the Holocaust-a vision which turns into a "universal, existentialist metaphor for the understanding of reality" (p. 108). According to Samuels, Celan's surrealist devices structure three semantic layers inherent in Celan's poetry: a top stratum of object-oriented motifs that convey his epistemological inquiry, a middle ideological layer that gives the empirical motifs meaning and establishes a "sociopolitical value system that relates to the poet's quest for an ideal society with an ideal political structure" (p. 2), and last, but not least, a bottom stratum that comprises his philosophy. According to Samuels, Celan's poetry situates itself in the proximity of Sartre's and Camus' existentialism, for it evokes the ways in which "art explores the human condition and the anguish of being" (p. 124). |
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| ISSN: | 0363-6941 1945-662X |