Heine's Displaced Philology

Heine's critical use of stock Romantic metaphors and images critically engages with the normative claims that inform the construction of the German literary canon. This essay explores his play with the metaphorical complex of organicism, uncovering his critique of the hermeneutic tradition of philology as a national project. Heine's metaphorics reread philology's obsession with singular origin and exclusionary boundaries of national literatures as a silencing and exclusion of its most creative voices. This “displaced philology” rejects the imperative of naturalization and homogenous constructions of language and culture as it returns the displaced to a position up front and in the center of a poetics that exposes the normative regime of the literary canon, and it rereads its linguistic politics to recover the creativity of the displaced

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