By John Knowles

John Knowles is a Faculty Librarian at the Queen's University of Belfast.


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Alfred Polgar: the limitations of culture

“The fate of the emigrant: a foreign country cannot become a homeland. Yet the homeland becomes a foreign country.” Born in Vienna in the latter part of the 19th century, the critic and essayist Alfred Polgar died in a Zurich hotel room in 1955. Exiled by Hitler’s rise to power, and only relatively recently returned…

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Accidental modernist: the nonsense poetry of Christian Morgenstern

  In his comparatively brief life, Christian Morgenstern, born 1871, was a writer of sketches and short pieces (feuilleton) for newspapers, an editor, among others, of Robert Walser, and a translator of Ibsen’s poems and lyric dramas. He also published a series of collections of lyric poems which formed the centrepiece of his serious literary…

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The Afterlives of Georg Trakl

  In the early 1950s, the American poet James Wright, wandered by mistake into the wrong classroom while studying at the University of Vienna and joined a seminar on the poet Georg Trakl. He describes how the professor leading the seminar read Trakl’s poems slowly, with enormous patience, in the twilit room. The only other…