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A Bakhtinian reconsideration of Joachim Ringelnatz's postwar poetry: Grotesque materialism instead of disinterested unresponsiveness

2021; Wiley; Volume: 77; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/oli.12334

1600-0730

Maxim Duleba,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Abstract Despite being a popular classic of German humorous twentieth‐century literature, Joachim Ringelnatz's work has received little scholarly attention. The following study questions the widely accepted stereotypical views that led to the scholarly marginalization of his work—namely the belief that his grotesque, humorous poetry is trivial and non‐reactive to the pressing issues of its time. By demonstrating Ringelnatz’s inclination towards the Rabelaisian chronotope as a specific literary time‐space reconstructed by Mikhail Bakhtin in Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel , this paper argues that Ringelnatz’s humorous poetry is neither historically irrelevant nor socially non‐reactive, because his adaptation of the Rabelaisian method confronts the traumatizing situatedness within the “painful time” of postwar Germany. Relating to Rabelais, Ringelnatz not only processes, but also recontextualizes the collective experience of postwar trauma, offering a “corrective” in the form of a “generative” (contra‐annihilative), “bodily‐oriented” time.