Lyric Orientations: Hölderlin, Rilke, and the Poetics of Community

by Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge

Overview

In Lyric Orientations, Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge explores the power of lyric poetry to stir the social and emotional lives of human beings in the face of the ineffable nature of our mortality. She focuses on two German-speaking masters of lyric prose and poetry: Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) and Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926). While Hölderlin and Rilke are stylistically very different, each believes in the power of poetic language to orient us as social beings in contexts that otherwise can be alienating. They likewise share the conviction that such alienation cannot be overcome once and for all in any universal event. Both argue that to deny the uncertainty created by the absence of any such event (or to deny the alienation itself) is likewise to deny the particularly human condition of uncertainty and mortality.

By drawing on the work of Stanley Cavell, who explores how language in all its formal aspects actually enables us to engage meaningfully with the world, Eldridge challenges poststructuralist scholarship, which stresses the limitations—even the failure—of language in the face of reality. Eldridge provides detailed readings of Hölderlin and Rilke and positions them in a broader narrative of modernity that helps make sense of their difficult and occasionally contradictory self-characterizations. Her account of the orienting and engaging capabilities of language reconciles the extraordinarily ambitious claims that Hölderlin and Rilke make for poetry—that it can create political communities, that it can change how humans relate to death, and that it can unite the sensual and intellectual components of human subjectivity—and the often difficult, fragmented, or hermetic nature of their individual poems.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801479328
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	01/28/2016
Series:	Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Table of Contents

A Note on Translations vii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: On Orientation 1

1 Skepticism and the Struggle over Finitude: Stanley Cavell 16

2 The Anxiety of Theory: Hölderlin's Poetology as Skeptical Syndrome 43

Friedrich Hölderlin, "Blödigkeit," "Das Nächste Beste," "Andenken" 71

3 Calls for Communion: Hölderlin's Late Poetry 84

4 Malevolent Intimacies: Rilke and Skeptical Vulnerability 118

Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonette an Orpheus (Excerpts) 147

5 Figuring Finitude: Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus 156

Epilogue: "Desperate Conversation"-Poetic Finitude in Paul Celan and After 193

Selected Bibliography 205

Index 215

What People are Saying About This

Amir Eshel

I find myself in complete agreement with the move, in Lyric Orientations, to employ the work of the philosopher Stanley Cavell in approaching Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke. Reading Hölderlin and Rilke within this philosophical framework allows Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge to suggest a fresh, much needed, and highly convincing alternative to the dominant Hölderlin and Rilke scholarship of recent decades that has focused on poetic expression as marking the difficulty if not inability of language to engage the world. Whereas philosophers such as Heidegger and Derrida and literary critics such as Paul de Man or Werner Hamacher read the work of Hölderlin and Rilke as marking a tension between language and its referents, and thus between poetic language and the realm of living, acting, speaking human beings, Eldridge displays how Hölderlin and Rilke actually offer in their work manners of meaningful engagement with and active participation in the world.

Editorial Reviews

"I find myself in complete agreement with the move, in Lyric Orientations, to employ the work of the philosopher Stanley Cavell in approaching Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke. Reading Hölderlin and Rilke within this philosophical framework allows Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge to suggest a fresh, much needed, and highly convincing alternative to the dominant Hölderlin and Rilke scholarship of recent decades that has focused on poetic expression as marking the difficulty if not inability of language to engage the world. Whereas philosophers such as Heidegger and Derrida and literary critics such as Paul de Man or Werner Hamacher read the work of Hölderlin and Rilke as marking a tension between language and its referents, and thus between poetic language and the realm of living, acting, speaking human beings, Eldridge displays how Hölderlin and Rilke actually offer in their work manners of meaningful engagement with and active participation in the world."

--Amir Eshel, Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies, Stanford University

From the Publisher

"I find myself in complete agreement with the move, in Lyric Orientations, to employ the work of the philosopher Stanley Cavell in approaching Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke. Reading Hölderlin and Rilke within this philosophical framework allows Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge to suggest a fresh, much needed, and highly convincing alternative to the dominant Hölderlin and Rilke scholarship of recent decades that has focused on poetic expression as marking the difficulty if not inability of language to engage the world. Whereas philosophers such as Heidegger and Derrida and literary critics such as Paul de Man or Werner Hamacher read the work of Hölderlin and Rilke as marking a tension between language and its referents, and thus between poetic language and the realm of living, acting, speaking human beings, Eldridge displays how Hölderlin and Rilke actually offer in their work manners of meaningful engagement with and active participation in the world."

Amir Eshel