Odyssey for Our Time: Barbara Köhler's Niemands Frau

In her 2007 poem cycle Niemands Frau, Barbara Kohler returns to Homers Odyssey, not to retell it, but to take up some of the threads it has woven into the cultural tradition of the West and to unravel them, just as Penelope, the wife of the hero who called himself Nobody, unravelled each night the web she re-wove by day. Kohlers return to the Odyssey takes place under the sign of a grammatical shift, from er to sie, from the singular hero to a plurality of female voices Nausicaa, Circe, Calypso, Ino Leucothea, Helen and Penelope herself with implications for thinking about identity, power and knowledge, about gender and relationality, but also about the corporeality and multivocality which underlies the virtual reality of the printed text.The eight essays in this volume explore Kohlers iridescent poem cycle from a variety of different angles: its context in contemporary German refigurations of the classical; its engagement with Homer and the classical tradition; its contribution to feminist philosophy of the subject and a female dialectic of enlightenment; its incorporation of the voices of poetic predecessors; and the surprising alliance it uncovers between poetry and quantum theory."