A comparative study of breath and breathing as a core poetic and compositional principle in modern literature. Breathing and its rhythms--liminal, syncopal, and usually inconspicuous--have become a core poetic compositional principle in modern literature. Examining moments when breath's punctuations, cessations, inhalations, or exhalations operate at the limits of meaningful speech, Stefanie Heine explores how literary texts reflect their own mediality, production, and reception in alluding to and incorporating pneumatic rhythms, respiratory sound, and silent pauses.. Through close readings of works by a series of pairs--Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg; Robert Musil and Virginia Woolf; Samuel Beckett and Sylvia Plath; and Paul Celan and Herta Müller--Poetics of Breathing suggests that each offers a different conception of literary or poetic breath as a precondition of writing. Presenting a challenge to historical and contemporary discourses that tie breath to the transcendent and the natural, Heine traces a decoupling of breath from its traditional association with life, and asks what literature might lie beyond. Stefanie Heine is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her previous books include Reading Breath in Literature (coauthored with Arthur Rose, Naya Tsentourou, Corinne Saunders, and Peter Garrett).
Author(s): Stefanie Heine
Series: SUNY series, Literature in Theory
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Year: 2021
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Preface
1 Movements of Syncopnea
Breath and Liminality
Anaximenes: Breath, Air, Soul, Wind
Inside and Outside
Life and Death, Animate and Inanimate
Breath as a Generative, Formative, and Constitutive Principle
Air and Pneuma as Primary Substances
Imaginations of a Primordial Wholeness of Breathing
Breath and Language
Prelinguistic Breathing
Breath and the Development of Speech
Breath, Voice, Rhythm
Inspiration
Transactual Relationality and Interdependence
Prospect
2 Composed on the Breath: Authentic Voice, Embodiment, Innovation (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg)
Ebb and Flow: Breathing and Composition
Ancient Origins of the Breath-Stop
Ginsberg and Quintilian
Kerouac and Aristotle
Smoke, Tapes, Typewriters: Respirational Writing Scenes
“Dynamo’d smoke-cathedrals”: Ginsberg’s Recorded Breath
“Rasping Smoke in a Dry Throat”: Kerouac’s Typewriter Fantasies
Anxiety—Ecstasy: Inspiration
“I don’t inhale”: Kerouac’s Repression
“Scored in Broken Breaths”: Ginsberg’s “Power” of Inspirational Weakness
A Silent Propellant: Charles Olson
3 Generative Caesurae: Mediality, Rhythm, Affect (Robert Musil, Virginia Woolf )
“Animi velut respirant”: Rhythm
Flow and Segmentation
The Breathing Pause in Ancient Rhetoric Revisited
Text-Internal Generative Caesurae
Formative Rhythm in Musil’s and Woolf’s Writing Process
Respiratory Composition
“Through the Middle”: Respiratory Mediality
Mediality and Invisibility
Mediation, Representation, Processual Figurative Language
Mediating Textual Airs
Beyond the Other Condition
Affect
Journey to Italy: “It was their breathing”
Opened and Allied Forms
4 Impossible Expiration: Reduction, Inanimate Voices, Persisting Bodies (Samuel Beckett, Sylvia Plath)
Beckett: “Dull with breath. Endless breath. Endless ending breath”
“L’air qui respire à travers mon cahier”
“I’m the partition”
“Stuffed full of these groans that choke”
“With breath in his nostrils, it only remains for him to suffocate”
Plath: “And still the lungs won’t fill”
“My god the iron lung”
“The vivid tulips eat my oxygen”
Cold Breath
“Blown askew”: Ecstatic Breath, Shattered Selves, Pneumatic Potentiality
Gendering
5 Breath at Point Zero: Trauma, Commemoration, Haunting (Paul Celan, Herta Müller)
Celan: “Pneumatisch berührbar”
“Es verschlägt ihm—und auch uns—den Atem und das Wort”: Breath in Celan’s Notes, Essays, and Speeches
Backgrounds of Celan’s Poetics of Breathing
Outline 1: Continuous Breathroutes
Outline 2: Interrupted Breathroutes
Inspiration—Conspiration
Breath in Celan’s Poetry and Translations
“Das Glas der Ewigkeit—behaucht: Mein Atem, meine Wärme drauf”: Celan’s Mandelstam Translation
Outline 3: The Pneumatically Touchable Poem I
“Hauchschrift, Handschrift”: “Ricercar”
Preliminarity
Repetition, Variation, Citation
Handwritten Breath-Seas
Outline 4: The Pneumatically Touchable Poem II
Müller: “Die Atemschaukel überschlägt sich”
Breath-Rifts: The Production of Atemschaukel
Phobic Animation: Poetic Implications of Breathing Words
Between Balance and Delirium: Movements of “Atemschaukel” in the Novel
“Dinge, die ohne zu leben untot sind”: Haunting the Readers
Trauma, Breath, Loss
Respiratory Gender-Turns
6 Pneumatic Gender Dynamics, Queering Breath
Breath and Intersectionality
Respirational écriture féminine
Breathing à travers
“To conclude—I announce what comes after me”
Notes
Bibliography
Index
