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Dominik Zechner\u2019s introduction to <\/em>The Violence of Reading, titled \u201cAllegories of Bleeding,\u201d gently puns on Paul de Man\u2019s Allegories of Reading, an important predecessor, as Zechner places questions concerning violence and pain at the forefront of his literary theoretical investigation into the vicissitudes, or violence, of reading. But whereas Elaine Scarry, whose classic The Body in Pain is another important interlocutor for Zechner, argues that pain cannot be communicated or translated (where pain, in other words, marks a limit to communication), Zechner argues that pain conditions both the possibility and impossibility of linguistic communication, our very being in language. Zechner does not so much argue that language encounters a limit at pain but rather that language is a pain, to borrow an idiom\u2014but one that discloses an uncomfortable truth. It causes trouble. It frustrates. As Zechner writes in Chapter Five, \u201cSublime Suffering,\u201d \u201cpain does not merely constitute one among many conceivable problems for representation, but rather the problem of pain fundamentally conditions the very possibility of representation\u2014so much so that every effort to represent something implicitly touches upon the problem of pain.\u201d Zechner engages a range of literary and philosophical texts across the chapters of <\/em>The Violence of Reading and through his investigation into pain as a fundamental conditioning possibility of representation, he offers a striking defense of close reading practices sensitive to the play (or pain) of trope and figure.<\/em> The central motivation of the book is to destabilize the assumption of transparent reference and to insist not on an ontological but on<\/em> This book is provocative, compelling, and beautifully written. Zechner has transformed the pain of reading into a very pleasurable experience.<\/em> Dominik Zechner writes: \u201cInstead of putting up a resistance to language as such, pain divests linguistic structures of their unreliable secondary functions\u201d\u2014communication, representation, etc.\u2014\u201cand discloses an occurrence of language divided from the constraints that subjugate its experience under the supremacy of phenomenal representation.\u201d In other words, pain is poetry. As every Tumblr girl already knows.<\/em> Zechners Kafka-Studien sind textnah operierende Denkbilder, Beitr\u00e4ge zu einer \u201cEthik des Lesens,\u201d die die Widerspr\u00fcche einer \u201cverkehrten Unendlichkeit\u201d nicht aufzul\u00f6sen versucht, sondern gr\u00fcndlich beschreibt. So hellsichtig, so anregend hat seit Heinz Politzers Kafkas-Interpretationen aus den 1960er Jahren kaum einer untersucht, wie Kafka vom \u201cProblem der Unendlichkeit\u201d erz\u00e4hlt: in \u201ceiner strukturell unendlichen, zirkul\u00e4r verfassten Stellvertreterlogik.\u201d Dieses Buch geh\u00f6rt in jedes Kafka-Seminar.<\/em> Zechners dichtes und teils sehr voraussetzungsreiches Buch blickt auf den knapp 250 Seiten nicht nur tief in das Verh\u00e4ltnis von Endlichkeit und Sprache am Paradigma Kafka, sondern enth\u00e4lt dar\u00fcber hinaus tiefe Reflexionen \u00fcber Kafkas Leser und<\/em> Taken as a whole, this book stakes its \u201cclaim of philology\u201d by estranging preexisting critical positions on Celan and fathoming his multivocal idioms as if for the first time.<\/em> Mendicino, Zechner and their fellow contributors succeed in showing the extent to which Celan\u2019s poetry and his concern for language as expression, medium of history, linguistic community and critical reflection concern us today. For \u201cpoems,\u201d as Celan writes in the notes to <\/em>The Meridian, are not \u201cmessages,\u201d not \u201cinformation\u201d; they are rather, as he puts it, \u201cunderway on routes on which language becomes voice, [\u2026] encounters, routes of a voice to a perceiving you.\u201d<\/em> Beautiful and very open in its structure, <\/em>Thresholds, Encounters is an invitation to dialogue.<\/em> The volume demonstrates an exemplary fidelity to a practice of philology that is attentive to language\u2019s capacity for ungrounding its propositions. It would not be an exaggeration to describe these performances of reading as tours de force.<\/em> The volume constitutes a most welcome and necessary contribution not only to the ever-growing scholarship on Walter Benjamin\u2019s work but, perhaps even more incisively, to contemporary debates around the function, mode, and value of education. This question\u2014what is teaching for? How to educate?\u2014receives various responses in the twelve contributions to the volume, responses that at turns seek to reformulate or suspend it. A particularly pressing version of this question, as the editors indicate in their fine introduction, derives from the fact that \u201cthe current moment urges us to reconsider the nexus between politics and pedagogy.\u201d<\/em>
\n\u2014Brian McGrath, Clemson University<\/p>\n
\na philological difference between language and experience. In this framework, language and pain are not merely associated but fundamentally intertwined. Reading becomes the decisive site where linguistic and phenomenal experience undergo a process of mutual unbinding. […] <\/em>The Violence of Reading is a philosophically rich and intellectually demanding work that challenges readers to reconsider the ethical and affective dimensions of interpretation.<\/em>
\n\u2014Qingchao Jia, Northeast Electric Power University<\/p>\n
\n\u2014Elissa Marder, Emory University<\/p>\n
\n\u2014Olivia Kan-Sperling<\/p>\nOn Kafka und das Problem der Endlichkeit<\/em><\/span><\/h3>\n
\n\u2014Michael Braun, University of Cologne<\/p>\n
\ndie Probleme, die sich auf dem Weg von der anf\u00e4nglichen Endlichkeit zum Ende des Buches entfalten. Es ist deshalb nicht nur<\/em>
\nals komplexe und reiche philologische Kafka-Studie zu betrachten, sondern bedeutsam in der spezifischen \u00d6ffnung des Existenziellen auf die Sprache hin. Zechner reflektiert, wartend beim Wort, mit und \u00fcber Kafka hinaus Scham, Sorge, Klage, Schmerz und das, was aus menschlichem Drang in und aus Sprache dr\u00e4ngt. Dabei ist dem Autor nachzusehen, dass es teils einige Zeit in Anspruch nehmen kann, seine Verwendung von Worten und ihre Verschiebungen zu verstehen. Vielmehr besteht darin gerade eine St\u00e4rke des Buches, das auf jeder Seite versucht, f\u00fcr das zu Sagende eine Sprache zu finden, die Balance h\u00e4lt zwischen der Endlichkeit und noch deren Endlichkeit selbst.<\/em>
\n\u2014Ioannis Dimopulos, Brown University<\/p>\nOn Thresholds, Encounters: Paul Celan and the Claim of Philology<\/em><\/span><\/h3>\n
\n\u2014Feng Dong, Qingdao University<\/p>\n
\n\u2014Reingard Nethersole, University of the Witwatersrand<\/p>\n
\n\u2014Ilit Ferber, University of Tel-Aviv<\/p>\n
\n\u2014Jason Groves, University of Washington, Seattle<\/p>\nOn Forces of Education: Walter Benjamin and the Politics of Pedagogy<\/em><\/span><\/h3>\n
\n\u2014Jonas Rosenbr\u00fcck, Amherst College<\/p>\n