Concentrating on the work of Paul Celan and Yoko Tawada, my dissertation explores the complicated role played by plants in post-war and contemporary German-language literature. Reflecting on and engaging with the intricate dynamics of vegetative life without the prejudice that it simply stands for an inferior form of life to that of the human, Celan and Tawada address such issues as uprootedness, displacement, and the transplantation of language. I argue that their concern with plant life offers them a refuge in language from language that has been increasingly instrumentalized and historically compromised. The two authors, each in their own way, create a version of what I call “plant writing” by transcending and reinscribing traditional botanical tropes. Tawada’s plant writing is a process that turns words into “word-leaves,” which constantly metamorphose into different meanings, sounds, and shapes that could be interpreted in a number of ways depending on its temporal, spatial, or linguistic context. Celan’s plant writing, especially attempted conversations with plants, become a way to address his “placelessness” [Ortlosigkeit] as a migrant who had never been granted a home and his “timelessness” [Zeitlosigkeit] as a Holocaust survivor who had been robbed of his history and home. Each author creates a dialogue with nature through which to imagine a new language that helps those who are no longer at home with their “mother tongue” to relocate themselves in a post-disaster world.

Creator

• Cao, Jan

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-r39f-ba68

Subject

• Comparative literature
• German literature
• Literature

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15517
• etdadmin_upload_812913

Keyword

• Migrant Literature
• Paul Celan
• Plants and Poetics
• Tawada Yoko
• Theory of Language

Date created

• 2021-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright