Mundart in global modernism: The poetry and poetics of Hwang Chiu and Ingeborg Bachmann

This dissertation examines the poetry and poetics of the South Korean poet Hwang Chiu through the work of the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann. From a perspective that emphasizes the local language in which the poems were written and the global language into which they are translated, the dissertation argues that the affinity of the two poets rests not only on their common Cold War contexts but also on their relationship to the specific linguistic material of their craft. A dialectic of history and subjectivity accounts for the power of their poems and informs, for example, their representations of such epochal experiences as the Second World War, the Korean War and the national division that they encounter obliquely as children of the adults who participated in the events firsthand. As second generation poets, they underline the continuity of past and present issues such as fascism, guilt, complicity, victimhood and perpetrator status.; The purpose of this dissertation is to introduce Hwang to a wider audience by examining his work through the sympathetic lens that Bachmann's poetics provides. My thesis is that recognition of the local dimension of Hwang's language is necessary for understanding his poetry, and that the effort of translation that such recognition requires is justified by the need for citizens of pluralist nations to construct multiple yet coherent identities.; The dissertation contains five chapters. The first chapter, entitled "The Dialectic of Subjectivity and History," introduces the reader to an array of overlapping topics that later chapters elaborate, including a description of the Korean language, Bachmann's Klangbilder, and the poets' regional and political Cold War constellations. The remaining chapters, whose main topics are indicated by the string of words Heimat, Zeitgedicht, Dialect, and Color, examine the concrete aspects of Hwang's poems within the discursive horizon provided by Bachmann. The dissertation implicitly advocates establishing cultural connections in specific and local terms by elevating the role of poetry and translation in the global world.