Bodies, Technology, and Emerging Notions of Subjectivity in the Poetry of Thomas Kling, Ulrike Draesner, and Durs Grünbein

Abstract

In the works of the 20th-century German poets Thomas Kling, Ulrike Draesner, and Durs Grünbein, modern developments in medical technology, such as tomography, transplant surgery, and discoveries in areas such as neuroscience, present a challenge to emerging concepts of interiority during the 1990s. Jörg Magenau and others refer to a paradigm shift in German literature of the 1990s, where new developments in medical technology allow for a turn away from 18th-century understandings of the body as a “whole” to one that is, quite literally, “opened up” through the authors’ poetic engagement with new developments in radiology, brain science, and also surgical procedures such as organ transplants. This trend is referred to by critics such as Magenau and Ruth Owen as a “new” form of interiority that allows for deeper understandings of the subject’s “interior.” According to critics such as Magenau, at the core of the “neue Innerlichkeit” are prose texts such as Reto Hänny’s 1994 prose work Guai, where a dissected cadaver is likened to lived experience. While the occurrence of medical and scientific advancement occurs similarly in the works of Kling, Draesner, and Grünbein, I argue that the poetic representation of this technology, including through aphasia and disrupted speech patterns, challenges the notion of a “new interiority” brought about by open depictions of the body.