METAMORPHOSES OF THE LETTER IN PAUL CELAN, GEORGES PEREC, AND YOKO TAWADA A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Gizem Arslan August 2013 © 2013 Gizem Arslan METAMORPHOSES OF THE LETTER IN PAUL CELAN, GEORGES PEREC, AND YOKO TAWADA Gizem Arslan, Ph. D. Cornell University 2013 This comparative dissertation project examines the critical status of written signs (letters of phonetic alphabets, Sino-Japanese ideograms, mathematical symbols, and punctuation marks) in translational, multilingual and intermedial techniques in literature since World War II and in an increasingly global and multicultural world since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Romanian-German poet Paul Celan, French author Georges Perec, and Japanese-German author Yoko Tawada respond to historical, political and literary moments in Europe that challenge the capacities of verbal arts to articulate turmoil, transformation, and silence, by transfiguring the very medium of writing on the micro-level of individual written signs. International scholarship on these authors and theoretical work on translation and multilingualism focus heavily on reference and meaning, frequently conflating word-fragmentation with illegibility. Often overlooked are elements of writing not widely considered to be vehicles of meaning. In response, this dissertation offers strategies for reading what might appear nonsensical as sensory, and the unreadable as newly legible. This project draws on the history and theories of writing systems from Plato’s Cratylus to debates on logocentrism (Jacques Derrida), as well as studies on writing and media, particularly the concept of notational iconicity (Sybille Krämer, Wolfgang Raible, Friedrich Kittler). It argues that Celan, Perec and Tawada subtly transform the very material of writing at the elemental level of written signs, treating letters and by extension texts as material objects in continual transformation. Relatedly, this project shifts its focus from translation as the reproduction of something familiar to transformation as the creation of something new, in order to illustrate that a transformative approach to translation gains far more than what is lost in translation, and that it gains something in addition to the semantic meanings that may accrue in translation. In doing so, this dissertation project offers the microperspective of written signs to Celan, Perec and Tawada scholarship in particular and to the literary humanities in general. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Gizem Arslan was born in 1980 in Istanbul, Turkey. She graduated in 2003 from Franklin and Marshall College (Lancaster, PA) with majors in English and German and a minor in Comparative Literary Studies. In August 2005, she entered the Department of German Studies at Cornell University as a graduate student. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of German at Knox College in Galesburg, IL. iii For my parents Hülya and Ziya Arslan and my grandparents Müşerref and Hüseyin Girgin iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Though writing a dissertation can be a long, isolating and amorphous process, it makes the heart grow all the more grateful to those who provide support, encouragement, feedback and nourishment at its many stages. I would like to thank Leslie A. Adelson for her extensive and invaluable feedback, endless generosity and many words of encouragement at every step. She not only demands from her students the highest degree of intellectual rigor, professional courtesy and personal dedication to all aspects of the academic profession; she embodies them. I feel lucky and honored to have had the opportunity to learn from the best example possible. I thank Wolf Kittler for the many stimulating and pleasurable hours of his Spring 2006 seminar “Theories of Language” at Cornell University, for whetting my appetite for Ancient Greek and the works of Jorge Luis Borges and Georges Perec, as well as for suggesting extremely fruitful leads and providing incisive feedback, particularly on the Perec chapter. I thank Natalie Melas for continually alerting me to important complexities and tensions where I was inclined to facilely resolve them. I thank Anette Schwarz for her generosity with her time and feedback not only in the dissertation phase but from the very beginning of my graduate career. I thank all of my advisors for holding my work to the highest standards while also stepping in to provide assistance on academic and administrative matters when it mattered most. This dissertation project has been funded at various stages by a DAAD/Max Kade Center Summer Research Grant from the Max Kade Center for Contemporary German Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, a Doctoral Research Fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), as well as Sage Fellowships, an International Research Travel Grant and Graduate School Research Travel Grant from Cornell University. I would like to thank Dieter Mersch of the v Institute for Aesthetics and Media at the University of Potsdam for providing an institutional home for my dissertation research in Germany, and for generously serving as a mentor and intellectual interlocutor during my stay there. Ela Bienenfeld graciously allowed me access to the archives at l’Association Georges Perec in Paris, where Christelle Reggiani, Bernard Magné and Paulette Perec helped me greatly in navigating its contents. My colleagues at Knox College provided an ideal environment for a visiting instructor in her very first year of full-time teaching. I thank Tim Foster, Emre Sencer and especially Todd Heidt for welcoming me into an extremely supportive, understanding and fair community of teachers and scholars. I am particularly grateful to Gregory Gilbert for his cool-headedness, good humor, continuous support and delightful company since my very first days at Knox. The friends to whom I owe most are strewn around the world, and are dispersing even as I write these acknowledgments. Mark Cohen, Ladi Dell’aira, Ségolène Lepresle, Ari Linden, Liesbeth Minnaard, Meredith Rousseau, Antonia Ruppel and Johannes Wankhammer provided various and timely nourishments. Eranda Jayawickreme and Pavel Atanasov have seen me writhing in academic pains the longest, and have been the most patient with me. I like to think that the earth shifts a little when the three of us come together. To both of them and to Kaisa Kaakinen, David Low and Althea Sircar: You sustain me. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Hülya and Ziya Arslan for their unyielding support for and belief in what I do, as well as their sacrifice, patience and love. Without the perseverance and foresight of my grandparents Müşerref and Hüseyin Girgin, I wonder if our best accomplishments would ever come to pass. This work is dedicated to my family. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Acknowledgments v Introduction. Letter Form in Transformation 1 Chapter One. Letteral Life: Dimensions of Caesurae, Address and Citation in Paul Celan’s Letters 30 Chapter Two. Purloined Vowl: Lipogrammatic Constraint and Letteral Entropy in Georges Perec 79 Chapter Three. Re-Membering Signs: Foreign Bodies, Letteral Impurities and Transformation in Yoko Tawada 128 Conclusion 173 Works Cited 177 vii INTRODUCTION: LETTER FORM IN TRANSFORMATION 1. Literary and Artistic Experimentation with Written Signs This study investigates paradoxes of textual materiality, that is, the paradoxical presence of textual absences as well as the transformation of textual elements that appear to be fixed. How can that which does not carry meaning partake in games of signification? How can an element of text, whose body presumably dissolves the moment it is deciphered, in fact possess a recalcitrant materiality? How can one sign, fixed on a page, be at once many, and even belong to more than one system of writing? How can a building block of text question, disrupt or dissolve the unity of a single text, the text medium at large, and the language(s) in which it is written? 1 If a medium is that which stands between and acts as intermediary in the broadest sense, how can any medium be made visible—and legible—despite that status? Textual materiality, medial paradoxes and textual transformation in literary studies, particularly in media studies and translation studies would call for a study of cosmic proportions. This study’s object of analysis is by contrast minute: the individual written sign and literary experimentation with written signs. 2 In the realm of literature, perhaps the primary strategy of letteral experimentation is fragmentation. Texts, lines, words, and even individual written signs are broken down into their constituent parts. This strategy forces the reader’s eye into an encounter with individual written elements instead of a monolithic text. Individual written signs become objects of scrutiny in themselves, irreducible to their identity or sound value. Though they are not widely regarded as vehicles of meaning, they partake in—but often disrupt—games of reference and meaning, 1 The word “medium”s etymology betrays the status of medium as an intermediary, as something standing in between. Medium in classical Latin means “medium middle, centre, midst, intermediate course, intermediary.” This study understands a medium very generally as anything that conveys (e.g. language, information), acts as intermediary (e.g. to comprehension, to experience) or tool. As will become increasingly clear, however, the term