Still Songs: Music in and Around the Poetry of Paul Celan

What does it mean for poetry and music to turn to each other in the shadow of the Holocaust, as means of aesthetic self-reflection? How can their mutual mirroring, of such paramount importance to German Romanticism, be reconfigured to retain its validity after the Second World War? These are the core questions of Axel Englund's book, which is the first to address the topic of Paul Celan and music.

Axel Englund is Associate Professor of Literature at Stockholm University, Sweden. His research is primarily concerned with interrelations between the arts and media, in particular the music and poetry of the modernist era. His other fields of interest include twentieth-century exile literature, concepts of aesthetic authenticity, and representations of gender and sexuality in opera. In 2011, Englund was an Anna Lindh Fellow at Stanford University (Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies) and he has held visiting scholarships at Columbia University (Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures) and Freie Universität Berlin (Institut für Theaterwissenschaft).

Introduction; Chapter 1 Play Death Sweeter: Musicality, Metaphoricity, Murder; Chapter 2 Fire in the Harp, in her Hair: The Lied and the Lullaby; Chapter 3 Rises and Plays: Interruptive Repetition and the Law of Musical Purity; Chapter 4 Into You, Into You I Sing: Spasmodic Speech and the Borders of the Human Body; Chapter 5 We Resound: Music In and Beyond the First Person Plural; Chapter 6 Shattered the Songs: Dissonances of a German-Jewish Musicality;