There and Away: Topobiographies (Signale Minima) - Softcover

Rainer Nägele

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501789155 ISBN 13: 9781501789151

Publisher: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library, 2026

Synopsis

Rainer Nägele'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 émigré, student, and scholar (Innsbruck, Göttingen, 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 Nägele's life became legible to him while illuminating wider historical configurations. Nägele's topobiographies emerge from encounters and re-encounters with memories of specific places as they interact with significant texts by Friedrich Hölderlin, 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.

About this title

About the Author

Rainer Nägele (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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1501789155
• ISBN 13: 9781501789151
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 108
• Editor: Hansjörg Quaderer