Documentation Swiss literatures

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[ book tip by Literatur Schweiz ] 59 texts from 15 years – reviews, portraits and reports – offer us an insight into the literary and art critic body of work of an author who regularly appears in public as an essayist and critic. The texts turn around 56 authors of contemporary art and literature, all nicely listed in the index at the end of the volume as well as in the table of contents. This makes for a little encyclopaedia of radical modernism and post-modernism in which subjective as well as very well researched and precisely documented articles balance each other. The entries range from Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) all the way to Christian Zehnder (born 1983). Adorno’s dictum about the «Verfransung der Demarkationen» (the disintegration of disciplinary demarcations) in art is quoted twice and shows us what Steiger means by the iridescent notion of non-places: the trans-disciplinary essential interest in literature and art that begins beneath the entanglement of the designers of terms and which explores the art of living as art of reading.

(Daniel Rothenbühler, trans. by Anja Hälg)

[ Favourite quote ] «... nur im poetischen Handeln, das heisst im kalkulierten Abweichen, kommen wir, quer durch die ‹Choreographie der Wahrheiten›, der Poesie näher.»

[ book info ] Steiger, Bruno: Zwischen Unorten. . (original language: Deutsch) Between Non-Places. Urs Engeler Editor, Basel, 2009 . ISBN: 978-3-938767-70-2.