Search

This dissertation examines precision as an aesthetic concept and practice in texts by Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969), Inger Christensen (1935–2009) and Herta Müller (1953–). Although often referred to in contemporary criticism as a marker of aesthetic value, precision in literature has rarely been the subject of academic study. The dissertation relates the meaning of precision in literature to its meaning in and for the natural sciences and takes the conceptual dependence of the former on the latter as its point of departure. It presupposes a connection between scientific or mathematical precision and the concept of nihilism, and, in a further step, makes the claim that modern literary precision should be viewed in light of a history fraught by nihilistic destruction. Two poetological texts by the poet Paul Celan (1920–1970) are identified as places where the concept of precision in its double function – both scientific/nihilistic and literary/poetic – is explicated in a historically decisive way. Together, they are construed as an interpretative frame for the subsequent readings of Gombrowicz, Christensen and Müller. The idea of “the zero point” as a point of orientation for literary precision is mapped out by way of an interpretation of Celan’s notion of “the date”. Literary precision is presented as a form of sensibility, determined by and determining sensible particulars, rather than general and abstract rules. The close readings of Gombrowicz, Christensen and Müller, focus on formative passages in each of the writer’s works where such sensibility is brought to the fore. Each reading is structured around a trope – the antinomy in the case of Gombrowicz, the chiasm in the case of Christensen and the simile in the case of Müller. All three are shown to reflect the act of precision in practice, express its guiding sensibility and demonstrate that it is paradoxical in nature – it can, so it is argued, ultimately be understood as a precision of the imprecise.