FROM "GEDICHT' TO "GENICHT': PAUL CELAN AND LANGUAGE SCEPTICISM

This article explores Paul Celan's critical engagement with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century language-sceptical discourses and literary traditions. Through a close analysis of the various kinds of linguistic negativism deployed in his poetry between the 1940s and the late 1960s, the article seeks to demonstrate that Celan may be seen as a late modernist closely akin to Samuel Beckett in his attempt to achieve a paradoxical Literatur des Unworts'.