Poetics of Breathing

Stefanie Heine is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her previous books include Reading Breath in Literature (coauthored with Arthur Rose, Naya Tsentourou, Corinne Saunders, and Peter Garrett).

"Heine's critical approach to Nancy might be conceived of from the standpoint of Celan's famous term auseinandergeschrieben (written-apart), commented upon by Nancy in The Sense of the World (1993): so closely does Heine engage with Nancy's work that her own writing eventually splits from it, not by betraying it, but by putting it into a crisis of sorts—and thereby creating something new. A greater testament to Nancy, and to the writers Heine reads throughout this book, would be difficult to imagine." — Critical Inquiry

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsPreface1. Movements of Syncopnea2. Composed on the Breath: Authentic Voice, Embodiment, Innovation (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg)3. Generative Caesurae: Mediality, Rhythm, Affect (Robert Musil, Virginia Woolf )4. Impossible Expiration: Reduction, Inanimate Voices, Persisting Bodies (Samuel Beckett, Sylvia Plath)5. Breath at Point Zero: Trauma, Commemoration, Haunting (Paul Celan, Herta Müller)6. Pneumatic Gender Dynamics, Queering BreathNotesBibliographyIndex