Dieser Beitrag wirft einen pragmatischen Blick auf Hartmanns Erec, um Textstrategien zu untersuchen, die imaginäre Räume öffnen. Von besonderem Interesse sind die Strategien der Inversio und der Aposiopesis. Dieser Aufsatz konzentriert sich hauptsächlich auf den ersten Teil von Erec und argumentiert, dass der Text den Rezipienten ermutigt, „entschlossen“ zu denken. / This contribution takes a pragmatic view of Hartmann's Erec to explore textual strategies that open imaginary spaces. Of particular interest are the strategies of inversio and the aposiopesis . Focusing primarily on the first part of Erec, this essay makes the argument that the text encourages the recipient to think 'decisively'.

This thesis investigates the uncanny (das Unheimliche) in five of Sylvia Plath’s 1962 poems: “Berck-Plage”, “The Arrival of the Bee Box”, “Daddy”, “Fever 103°”, and “Death & Co.”. Furthermore, it looks at how the biographical circumstances in which the poet found herself while writing the poems, may have influenced them. Drawing mainly on Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny” and the 2003 The Uncanny by Nicholas Royle, this thesis examines a variety of elements in Plath’s poems including, but not limited to, the beach as a liminal space, aposiopesis as intellectual uncertainty and as an example of l’écriture féminine, thresholds in the form of windows, shoes, and locked boxes, severed limbs as examples of Viktor Shklovsky’s defamiliarization, Latin as a heimlich/unheimlich language, the uncanny effect of darkness, silence, and solitude, the double as a harbinger of death, the wish to both include and exclude the specter and that which is strange, and breathlessness and euphoria as manifestations of madness. Furthermore, it examines hitherto unexplored potential influences on Plath’s poetry, including but not limited to, the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thérèse of Lisieux, Franz Kafka, and Knut Hamsun. Because of the ambiguity of the concept of the uncanny, this thesis incorporates a host of material such as taped interviews conducted by Harriet Rosenstein, Subha Mukherji’s Thinking on Thresholds, Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves, and Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. In conclusion, this thesis argues that the uncanny is an instrumental key to the comprehension of Plath’s late poetry.