Speaker
Description
This paper reads Franz Janowitz’ WWI poems as a laboratory for a language of crisis within an interdisciplinary frame of ecocriticism, ecolinguistics, and semiotics of crisis. It asks how a lyric still shaped by a long German tradition of form (from Buch von der deutschen Poeterey onwards) can register the technologised, atmospheric violence of modern war without either heroic continuity or radical formal rupture.
Instead of staging catastrophe directly, Janowitz’ writing keeps returning to landscapes, trees, light, rivers, and birds. I trace how this attentional world persists once war has begun, while its internal relations shift: The attentional stance remains intact, yet it is no longer entirely sheltered: certain images recur with a new tautness; moments of negation, hesitation, or perspectival shift mark slight disturbances in an otherwise continuous lyric texture.
What is striking is not rupture but the persistence of a perceptual ethos under conditions that would later be understood as historically catastrophic. In Janowitz’ terms, one could say it is the World (in) War taking away the earth he so curiously directs his gaze towards. Crisis appears here not as event or theme but as an almost subcutaneous adjustment of how relation, scale, and address are organised, small inflections that register pressure without conceding the collapse of form or world.
A second, shorter step introduces Hans Janowitz’ novel Jazz (1927), whose opening imagines a historian in 1999 looking back on 1925. I re-function this device to ask how a voice in 2099 might narrate 2025, and to indicate why such a micro-poetics matters for present debates on war, sustainability, and crisis discourse.
Methodologically, the paper combines historical poetics and eco-narratology with fine-grained linguistic analysis to propose Franz Janowitz as a case study for how literature begins to generate a language of crisis before the concept becomes a self-description of our age.
| Keywords | Franz Janowitz, ecolinguistics, phenomenology of attention, modern warfare and literature, crisis discourse |
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| konstantin.schmidtbauer@uniroma1.it |