Founded · Berlin Issue 11 · December 2020 ISSN · Quarterly

Die Wiederholung

A Journal of Literary Criticism
Issue Eleven
Die Wiederholung December 2020
108 pages · ISBN 978-3-947327-08-9
In This Issue

Four voices on what remains once the grand narratives have fallen silent

This issue holds four essays on works that put writing itself to the test: the centuries-spanning parallels of Péter Nádas, the solemn sound of a Maeß, Frank Witzel's apocalyptic radio play, and a third attempt to read David Foster Wallace without closing the book on him.

Die Wiederholung sees itself as a workshop for literary attention. It offers no reviews, only slow listening, rereading and an insistence that books deserve time.

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The Essays in This Issue

four readings, four registers, one shared breath
Essay I

Parallel Lines, Crisscrossing: Parallel Stories by Péter Nádas

by Lilla Balint

Across more than seventeen hundred pages, three generations and two cities, Lilla Balint follows the hidden lines that Nádas draws between bodies, dictatorships and unspoken loyalties, and asks what parallelism can mean in a novel at all.

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Essay II

On the Tone of the Text: Emanuel Maeß's Joints of Light

by Jakob Brüssermann

What do we hear when we read a novel? Jakob Brüssermann listens to the elevated, at times almost pathetic sound of Maeß's debut and tests whether invoking Hölderlin's registers grows into a language of its own.

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Essay III

Trauma, Death Drive and the Transcending of Guilt and History

by Bärbel Lücke, on Frank Witzel's The Apocalyptic Light Bulb

Bärbel Lücke reads Frank Witzel's radio play and film with a psychoanalytic ear, as an attempt to listen out the German postwar silence's own sound trace and, in doing so, to transcend the guilt that keeps ticking in the quiet.

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Essay IV

Somehow at the End: Part Three on David Foster Wallace

by Nataniel Christgau

What remains when everything was irony and irony itself has grown tired? Nataniel Christgau continues his engagement with Wallace and looks for what comes after the ending: a quiet, bewildered sincerity.

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About the Journal

Die Wiederholung is in no hurry. It returns to books that can bear a second and a third reading, and it does so without the noise of the daily arts pages. What appears here is essay writing in the narrow sense: an attempt.

We believe that literary criticism need not be a pan or an advertisement but a form of thinking along. Each issue gathers four to six longer texts devoted to a single work or a single voice, written with care, slowness and patience.

The Editors

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