Language, Plasticity, Modernism: Dvoyre Fogel`s Poetics

My lecture will uncover and examine the oeuvre of Debora Vogel, a key figure in the constellation of Yiddish and Polish modernity, by opening an inquiry into the questions of multiplicity of style across literature, philosophy, and visual arts. Debora Vogel (1900-1942) was a high Modernist poet, author of prose, philosopher, translator and art critic who lived in Lviv (the then Eastern Galicia, Poland, now Western Ukraine). I argue that Debora Vogel’s singular style stages the relationship between art and life as a plastic one (i.e. giving and receiving form). My analysis of Vogel’s creative method of poetics of cold stasis serves as an example of how art is folded into life, and life is folded into art, in a manner that puts to question the traditional Western concepts of representation, knowledge production and disciplinary divisions. Vogel deploys the principles of stasis and dynamism, informed by Cubism and Constructivism, as well as philosophical discourses on aesthetics. My project presents a rethinking of literary history of Modernism and the study of visual cultures to date, through mapping unexplored connections within circles of Yiddish and Polish modernists, as well as networks of the Euro-American avant-garde. I will analyze her affiliations namely the group of artists and intellectuals around the Tsushtayer publishing house in Galicia, and the group of Inzikhistn (poets of the Introspectivist movement) in New York. She was an active contributor to both circles, exploring the questions of modernist idiom and Jewish identity in the tumultuous 1920s-1930s.