Dissociative imagism: A study of Else Lasker-Schuler's poetry

Abstract

The following study examines the poetry of Else Lasker-Schuler in its historical context, particularly as this is registered by idiosyncracies in the aesthetic medium. The historical background reflects conflicts like those between nature and civilisation, Rationalism and Irrationalism, conceptual logic and the aesthetic media, dissociation and totalitarianism. Such antagonisms are seen as inter-locking aspects of Lasker-Schuler's poetry. The aim has not been to impose external criteria but to reveal their constitutive role in poetry, and, in this way, to elicit its own essential significance. After an introductionthe first chapter refers to aesthetic theories in Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Benjamin sees a concentration of relationships in poetry; Adorno emphasises the breach between socialised and aesthetic experience, thus illuminating a latent social purpose in the very purposelessness of art, striving for emancipation from the fetters of the past.The last hypothesis is reflected in chapter headings. A central chapter, Inside Out (3), stands for the inversion of perspectives in poetry. The dissociating poet projects herself as a Sphinx (l) into a pre-industrial, mythological identity; she becomes a Shadow (2) in relation to modern norms; in the image of the Hieroglyph (4) the paradox of dissociation as the medium of communication between religious, aesthetic and secular domains becomes emphatic. An alien or foreign identity serves as a pretext for the poetry in the German Mother-tongue (5). The second part of the study considers the over-lapping influences of neo-romantic Overflow (6) and expressionistic Ferment (7) and the Genesis (8) of the lyrical ego culminating in a Mirage (9) of elusive imagism. Under historical pressures the feigned reality of Lasker-Schuler's imagism becomes mannered, a Frieze (10), particularly in the fiction of a pre-industrial alternative. This fiction is relinquished and the lyrical ego finds an intermittent voice once more, despite the knowledge of failure and of real Exile (ll) from Germany.