An Epic's Hydropoetics: On the Waters of Uwe Johnson's Jahrestage. Issue 2 (3rd April 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Miller, Matthew D.
• Is Part Of: Germanic review. Volume 93:Issue 2(2018)
• Page Start: 109
• Page End: 129
• Publication Date: 2018-04-03
• Subjects: Hydropoetics -- Jahrestage -- Johnson -- Modern Epic -- Water; Germanic philology -- Periodicals; Philologie germanique -- Périodiques; Germaanse talen; Letterkunde; 430.05
• DOI: 10.1080/00168890.2018.1441116
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0016-8890

Abstract

Abstract : This article addresses the narrative, metaphorical, and structural reliance of Uwe Johnson's Jahrestage on the element of water. The hydrocentric imagination operative in Johnson's literary navigation of the Cold War calls for an account of the work's form and content from the perspective of hydropoetics. I make use of this term to explain the integrative features of Jahrestage 's epic narrative amid great entropy as well as the interaction of Gesine's narrative waves with aquatic and social environments. As the modern epic's quasi-mythic, yet non-identical, substrate, water provides occasion for differentiation and variation, specification and historicization across the undulating form of Jahrestage 's 366 daily chapters. Within its rhythmic tides, I argue, Jahrestage foregrounds Gesine's negotiations of cultural, ethnic, economic, political, and gender difference in the metropolitan environment to deliver an incisive treatment of urban modernity's unresolved challenges.