Winfried Kudszus Livres

Questioning culturally predetermined consolidations of childhood experience, this study focuses on memory and affect on the verge of linguistic formulation. Fairy tale plots frequently function as cover-ups of a deeply rooted violence that expresses itself through sensibilities of the skin and in presymbolically charged cataclysms. In a narrative border zone, early linguistic and psychic events reemerge with primordial force. Split into seemingly irreconcilable opposites, good and evil engage in warfare with each other; cannibalism and infanticide take hold of family life. Four tales are presented here as related in 1857 by the Brothers Grimm, along with new translations. Through in-depth readings of these intricately interpersonal texts, this inquiry explores a frightful silence.

Georg Trakl (1887–1914) has emerged as one of the most influential poets of the century. Kudszus both explores and participates in the relentless process of Trakl’s writing. Presumptions of objectivity, authority, dialogue, and coherence are questioned in a discourse that also involves Martin Heidegger’s philosophical reflections on Trakl, C. G. Jung’s self-analytical reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and the Bluebeard tale as related by Charles Perrault. Faithful to its title, Poetic Process activates key issues of twentieth-century poetry—terror, pain, madness, imagination unbound—through a dynamically self-reflective inquiry. Under the impact of the poetic text, this investigation engages in a continuous refinement and transformation of its own critical stance. Poetic Process draws on the ability of poetry to explore uncharted realms of the human condition. The result is a contribution to the knowledge of poetic language and effects.