The sound of writing

I started writing the new chapter today, here's a little excerpt:

In the previous chapter, I showed how the orchestration of the caesuras in the text was a main aesthetic strategy in Zender’s first Hölderlin work. This is not the case in the second work. Not that the chosen text is any more fluent in Hölderlin lesen II than in the first work, on the contrary, it is much more fragmented. Whereas in An die Madonna large fluent parts are abruptly and expressively cut off in mid-sentence, making the arising caesuras negative centres of ineffable meaning, Sonst nämlich, Vater Zeus…could be described as perforated by caesuras which incessantly hinder the formation of a fluent meaning. The nearly constant disjunction of the textual flow does not give the caesuras the acute dramatic effect they have in An die Madonna. Instead, the lack of fluency gives the impression of stuttering. The break in communication is not sudden, but constant, and instead of pointing towards something which cannot be said, it thus leads the attention towards the difficulties of utterance as such. As I will explore later in this chapter, Zender lets his music approach this “poetics of stutter”, which Craig Dworkin has identified as a central strategy in experimental art. The frequent repetition of words and sentences in the poem, something which did not occur at all in the first work, could be understood as an emphasis on the stuttering nature of the text.