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The recent venerations of Paul Celan on the occasion of his centenary invite further reflection on how his poems reach across time. As immersed as they are in their own here and now, Celan's poems demonstrate a remarkable capacity to touch on others' histories and experiences and to be touched by them in turn. Drawing on the elaborations of touch in transnational German studies, and the ways in which touch apprehends relations that fall outside of the purview of comparison, opposition, reception, and encounter, this introduction sketches out a framework for appreciating the connections that his poetry facilitates. The essays that follow offer connective readings of Celan that range from the 13th-century Anatolian mystic Yunus Emre to the contemporary American poet Claudia Rankine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turning much of received scholarship on its head, for Stifter we witness the birth of geology out of the spirit of restoration and for Viollet-le-Duc the birth of restoration out of the spirit of geology. Timothy Attanucci: The Restorative Poetics of a Geological Age: Stifter, Viollet-le-Duc, and the Aesthetic Practices of Geohistoricism. Timothy Attanucci: The Restorative Poetics of a Geological Age: Stifter, Viollet-le-Duc, and the Aesthetic Practices of Geohistoricism. [Extracted from the article]

Chronic low-level exposure to environmental toxins, including cadmium (Cd), is a growing problem in the industrialized world. One promising strategy for protection from these toxins is the use of low-dose exposure of environmental chemicals to induce cell tolerance and recovery, a phenomenon known as “protective hormesis”. Hormetic [low-dose stimulatory] effects occur in a variety of systems and with a number of chemicals. Cd is a potent carcinogen in rodents and has also been linked to human lung and prostate cancers. In the present study, we have evaluated the protective effects of low and ultra-low dose, long-term Cd exposure in the normal human prostate cells, RWPE-1. Cells were exposed to low and ultra-low doses (0, 0 (S −36 ), 10 −6 , 10 −7 , 10 −18 , 10 −21 , 10 −32 , or 10 −36 M ) of Cd for 20 weeks followed by treatment with 10 −5 M Cd for another 8 weeks. Continuous exposure of RWPE-1 cells to 10 −5 M Cd results in malignant transformation. However, cells pretreated with low and ultra-low doses of Cd had delayed transformation compared with controls. In addition, the number of transformed cell mounds was lower in pretreated cells indicating that low and ultra-low dose exposure had protective effects against high-dose Cd induced carcinogenesis. The expression of metallothionein (MT), the primary Cd detoxification protein, was induced by low-dose exposure to Cd and maintained during the 20 weeks. In addition, MT-1G mRNA was up-regulated 2- to 3-fold by low-dose and ultralow-dose Cd exposures and may be the mechanism of protective hormesis in this model. MT-1G mRNA might also serve as a biological indicator of very low-dose environmental Cd exposure.

Bruce Magnusson and Zahi Zalloua, eds. Contagion: Health, Fear, Sovereignty. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2012. 202 pp. Emerging from a symposium convened in 2010 by the Whitman College's Global [...]

Hunsehe, Christina. Textereignisse und Schlachtenbilder. Eine sebaldsche Poetik des Ereignisses. Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2012. 433 pp. 38,00 [euro] paperback. Readers of W.G. Sebald will have cause to celebrate the prospect [...]

The article focuses on "subnatural," a third type of landscape as described by French gardener and writer Gilles Clément which according to him consists of smoke, puddles and dust. Topics discussed include the rural settings of Romanticism and Realism, criticism of the depiction of the natural world by Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter, and a 1918 essay by German literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin on Austrian writer and poet Stifter's writing.

This essay examines a cognitive and perceptual shortcoming exposed in section thirteen of Walter Benjamin's ‘Artwork in the Age of Mechanical Reproducability’. Although we have a basic understanding of walking, writes Benjamin, we have no idea what transpires in the moment of taking a step. At the same time, Benjamin's writing seems to encounter a block in attempting to describe an impasse in our perception of the most elemental mode of passing through space: of the five published versions of this passage no less than four are syntactically or punctuationally distinct. Such writing about deviant movement invites speculation into the deviant movement of writing. Given the emphasis in the artwork essay on the capacity of film to explore, expose, and explode unnoticed details, and given its insistence on departing from commonly accepted accounts of movement, the staggered and staggering writing of this section likewise merits the quasi-photographic parameter of scrutiny facilitated by philology. Out of the undifferentiated movement of walking emerge unperceived possibilities of articulation – a poetics of the step – as well as new ways to articulate the performativity of Benjamin's prose. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Literary writing has operated as a space of inquiry unsettling the literal and figurative ground on which thinking takes place. From Hölderlin's invocations to the ether, to Walter Benjamin's characterization of Baudelaire's poetry as unfathomable, a certain tradition of writing, particularly in German letters, takes shape around a critique of gravity. Against the background of a geopoetics, I propose to turn to the question of an inconstant and inconsistent ground in Paul Celan's 'geological lyric' by explicating the relationship in his writing between the earth and its unthought other: air. This reading has as its object of inquiry what I am calling Celan's aerography, which is doubly articulated in the turn to aerial space in his poetry and in his articulation of the work of air in those terrestrial landscapes formed and deformed by aeolian processes. I argue that the radically dissipative geographies evoked in his poems could extend critical geographic inquiry into a multiple and turbulent materiality; however, the sheer spectrality of the material world in Celan's poetry seems to require an (a)material criticism, that is, a materiality without matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the new stage directions in Samuel Beckett's play, "Waiting for Godot." The new staging of "Waiting for Godot" could question the freedom and self-expression in association with the dramatic form. Moreover, it's stage presents a scene of dramatic mastery which is the site of confinement, constraint and manipulation wherein anti-humanistic drama language challenges the play's metaphysical and psychological interpretations.