Visualizing Space
Third-Generation Jewish Self-Positioning in Poems and Poetry Films
Building on previous research about third-generation writing and authorship, this doctoral dissertation will expand the field of literary memory studies by exploring visual expressions of self-positioning in third-generation Jewish poetry and poetry films. To do so, it will analyze the ways in which poets like Hanna Rajs, Gabriel Itkes-Sznap, Yevgeniy Breyger, and Max Czollek and filmmakers like Katia Lom, Yulia Ruditskaya, Evgenia Gostrer, and Daniella Schnitzer visualize motifs pertaining to space and the lyrical subject’s spatial situatedness across a range of languages and cultural contexts.
This project is situated at the intersection between literary memory studies and visual culture studies, and is also informed by film studies. It investigates various recurring visual(ized) motifs relating to space on three levels: the private sphere (such as “the house”/“home”), the public sphere (including loci such as society, nature, social media/marketing), and a third space in between the private and the public (above all “spaces of faith,” e.g., synagogues).
Poems and poetry films will be studied in close readings and “close watchings”, examining imagery expressed verbally or pictorially. While the project will focus above all on the thematic level of poetry and poetry film, the motif study will also reveal the many formal layers embedded within written poetry and poetry films, especially in regard to the interaction between image and word. How do images – or pictures in the case of poetry films – and words combine or collide?
One of the central considerations of this research project is how Jewish cultural production becomes a form and practice of resistance and disintegration on the part of Jewish poets and filmmakers today by centering Jewish lyrical subjects, perspectives, and voices – and their current negotiation in regard to the crossing of boundaries of various kinds, such as those of identity, as well as national or linguistic, and temporal boundaries, revealing how subjects relate to their past, present, and future, and movement in between the same. While the sources studied have been chosen on the basis of their authors’ Jewish heritage, membership of the third generation, and geographical location (being born in and/or working in Europe), the study also aims to explore spatial motifs that do not explicitly relate to the Shoah or the memory of the same. Rather, it will explore the relationship between visualizations of “space” as well as material objects within those spaces, and their significance in constructing and situating the “self.” However, as the project will show, family memory, intergenerational belonging and alienation, exile and finding home, and the told and the unspoken will play an important role in discussing the motifs.
Finally, this project will examine representations and lyrical constructions pertaining to the lyrical subject created by Jewish poets and filmmakers without any aspirations to define or delimit Jewishness as a whole or the Jewishness of any individual poet and filmmaker. Rather, at the center of the project will be a multitude of transcultural perspectives and relationships to identity, and the envisioning of positions in space (as well as interactions with the material objects within it), functioning as “portals” of memory via which lyrical subjects travel imaginatively through both space and time.