Author: Phyllis Koehler, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics , University of Cambridge

Abstract: »Phyllis Koehler’s “Against Inarticulation: Sexual Violence and the Limits of the Verbal in Unica Zürn’s Dunkler Frühling” also considers how innovative form may be used to articulate what cannot otherwise be said. This chapter explores representations of sexualised violence in the novella Dunkler Frühling (1969) by Unica Zürn. Koehler considers how Zürn’s work collapses in and through representation, emerging from narratives of traumatic re-organisations of experience, and restages language’s breakdown in language. “We scream before we speak”, claims Koehler, highlighting that the events around which Zürn’s novella circles (including rape, sadism/masochism and suicide) are defined by the ways in which they may bring about a regression towards states and sounds humans make before language has been learned. While paying attention to the potentials emerging in a language that puts its own powers of transmission into question, Koehler also demonstrates how such poetics, despite their potential to convey the horrors and iniquities of violence, often concur with a masculinist culture that conceives of violence as a phenomenon that can only be feared or legally repaired, not fought. To what extent can actions and experiences be said to exist in politically useful ways if they cannot be represented? How can experiences of marginalisation be read not within the logics of an idealised victimhood which is aspired towards because it is acknowledged by the law, but rather as a call for multiform expansions of our critical imagination?« (Source: Ivana Perica, Catriona Corke and Philipp Wegmann. »Literary Acts of Agency: Negotiating the Rule of Law An Introduction.« Literary Acts of Agency: Negotiating the Rule of Law. Edited by Ivana Perica et al. Berlin 2026: 11)

Contents:

	1 Of screams and silence (p. 75)
	2 Towards a speech of speechlessness (p. 77)
	3 Fantasies from beyond the grave (p. 84)
	Bibliography (p. 89)

Reviews: -

Wikipedia: History of Europe: History of Germany | Literature: German literature / Unica Zürn | Sex and the law: Sexual violence