The Poetics of the Combat Zone: Erich Maria Remarque's Im Westen nichts Neues
2019; Wiley; Volume: 92; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/gequ.12091
ISSN1756-1183
Autores Tópico(s)German Literature and Culture Studies
ResumoHow can the carnage of war inspire poetry, and how do writers make sense of the combat zone when they are plunged into the fog of war? Erich Maria Remarque's Im Westen nichts Neues (1929) remains, even after ninety years, a touchstone for writers caught in the paradox of creating art from injury, bloodshed, and loss. Remarque's anti‐war novel challenged fantasies about war as a process of purification and rejuvenation, but it also brought back (and regenerated, as it were) a soldier from the dead to tell his story. In a cascading series of crises ranging from the linguistic to the existential, Remarque's protagonist, Paul Bäumer, tries to tell a “true” war story by drawing on a new aesthetic register affiliated with the grotesque, one that values fragmentation and deformation in its representational practices.
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