This is the first monograph devoted to José F. A. Oliver, the prolific poet, essayist, and translator. Born in Hausach, Germany, Oliver has received numerous prizes for poetry and serves as the current president of the PEN Centre Germany. Through close readings of a representative selection of poems and excerpts from the essays, this study focuses – through the lens of the dialectic of self and other – on Oliver’s complex, yet lyrical aesthetics, on the inspiration he draws from Federico García Lorca and Friederike Mayröcker (as well as Paul Celan, Hilde Domin, and Friedrich Hölderlin), and on major motifs and themes in his oeuvre. Fraught with tension, the poems explore the self ’s experience of otherness vis-à-vis identity, homeland, and language, as well as vis-à-vis the city, the lover, and death. This inquiry includes Duende, the elusive spirit that animates flamenco (Lorca), the transcendent poetics of solace (Mayröcker), and the lingual, cultural, and post-identitarian hybridity evolving from a nomadic mindset. The monograph also addresses the flâneur’s attempt at reading the modern metropolis, Heimat’s conundrum of (violent) exclusion and (viable) inclusion, the notion of love as an ›untouchable closeness‹, the salvific trope of Orpheus, and the polyphonic ethics of multilingualism. Among others, this study relies conceptually upon Bernhard Waldenfels’s phenomenology of foreignness, Rosi Braidotti’s theory of nomadism, Plato’s disquisition on love, Roland Barthes’s explication of mourning, Homi Bhabha’s notion of a ›Third Space‹, Franz Hessel’s paradigm of flânerie, and the allegory of the Dance of Death and its gendering of death figures.weiterlesen