Congratulations to Professor Kristina Mendicino on the publication of her new book Thresholds, Encounters: Paul Celan and the Claim of Philology with co-author Dominik Zechner, Assistant Professor of German at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.
Paul Celan's works dwell on the threshold between the extremes of poetic expression and philosophical reflection. The divergent literary and critical idioms that have marked Celan's writing--and that Celan's writing has come to mark for others (Hamacher, Derrida, Szondi)--thus call for a new philology. This philology cannot be situated within presupposed genres or fields but rather explores the ways in which poetic and philosophical ambitions meet in texts by, and on, Celan. The first part of Thresholds, Encounters ('Ex-posing the Poem") speaks to issues of history, ecology, and aurality; the second part ("Language Dislodged") delves into Celan's articulations of encounter, positionality, and translation. Throughout, contributors probe the consequences of Celan's poetry for thinking and writing, while inviting readers from different disciplinary spaces to further pace out the liminal zones opened by his oeuvre.