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9781501789151 Academic Inspection Copy

There and Away

Topobiographies
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Rainer Naegele's There and Away charts a series of autobiographical topographies or "topobiographies" that map a life beginning in a working-class village in Liechtenstein to the places he traveled as an emigre, student, and scholar (Innsbruck, Goettingen, Paris, California, Baltimore). Located at the nexus of Freud's elaboration of the child's game of fort (away) and da (there) and Benjamin's thought-images of his Berlin childhood, the eight placed-based vignettes of There and Away do not tell a life story but rather bring together momentary traces of encounters into a constellation, in which aspects of Naegele's life became legible to him while illuminating wider historical configurations. Naegele's topobiographies emerge from encounters and re-encounters with memories of specific places as they interact with significant texts by Friedrich Hoelderlin, Paul Celan, and Walter Benjamin. There and Away thus meditates on what it means to return to the same places and the same texts at different points in time, each encounter at once familiar and revealing something utterly unique.
Rainer Naegele (1943-2022) earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and taught at Ohio State University, Johns Hopkins University, and Yale University, where he was the Alfred C. & Martha F. Mohr Professor Emeritus of German Language and Literature.
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