The Language of Romanticism : After the Holocaust
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| Year of publication | 2013 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The Romantics sought to represent a direct and unmediated experience of reality, as Wordsworth assured the reader in his Preface. They were, nonetheless, somewhat worried that language was not capable of adequately portraying reality. The theme of language inadequacy has been recently in a more urgent way brought up by Holocaust Studies when scholars as well as the Holocaust survivors detected a sort of incompatibility between linguistic representation and the horror of the camps. The paper argues that there is a possibility of finding in Romantic poetry a language based on solidarity with suffering; a language that sustains human life, keep readers "in the company of flesh and blood", and brings people closer to things as the Romantics wished. |
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