In each case, Holderlin is examined as the occasion for salvaging that legacy after, from, and in view of the catastrophe. This first full-length study of Holderlin's postwar reception will be of interest to students and scholars working in the fields of German literature, European philosophy, the politics of cultural memory, and critical theory."--BOOK JACKET.
Reinterpreting Badiou's philosophy in light of both his persistent, reverent invocations of the German-Jewish poet Paul Celan, and his long-term engagement with Samuel Beckett, Badiou, Poem and Subject fundamentally reassesses Badiou's radical departure from the legacy of Martin Heidegger, and his wholesale rejection of philosophies that would, in the wake of twentieth-century violence and beyond, proclaim their own end or completion. For Badiou, both writers, from the terminus of Literary Modernism, affirm novel conceptions of subjectivity capable of transcending the historical conditions of their presentation: Celan's collective and ephemeral subject of 'anabasis', and Beckett's disjunctive 'Two' of love. Blending close textual analyses with critical reflections on Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe and Adorno, among others, Tom Betteridge argues that Badiou's innovative readings of both Celan's poetry and the 'latent poem' in Beckett's late prose are crucial to understanding his significance in the history of twentieth-century French philosophy and its German heritage, offering a significant contribution to a growing field of interest in Badiou's philosophical encounter with poetry, and its political ramifications.
Reading Martin Heidegger's five conversational texts together for the first time, Heidegger's Conversations elaborates not only what Heidegger thought but how he did so by attending to the philosophical possibilities of the genre of these under-studied texts written between 1944 and 1954. Though he wrote little on the topic of teaching and learning explicitly, Katherine Davies shows Heidegger performed an implicit poetic pedagogy in his conversations that remains to be recognized. Heidegger launched an experimental attempt to enact a learning of non-representational, non-metaphysical thinking by cultivating a distinctly collaborative sensitivity to the call of the poetic. Davies illustrates how each conversation emphasizes a particular pedagogical element—non-oppositionality, making mistakes, thinking in community, poetic interpretation, and the dangers of such pedagogy—which together constitute the developmental arc of these texts. Whether Heidegger is revising or reinforcing his own earlier pedagogical practices, Davies argues that attending to the dramatic staging of the conversations offers a distinct vantage point from which to contend with Heidegger's philosophy and politics in the post-war period.
Hölderlin (1770-1843) is the magnificent writer whom Nietzsche called 'my favourite poet'. His writings and poetry have been formative throughout the twentieth century, and as influential as those of Hegel, his friend. At the same time, his madness has made his poetry infinitely complex as it engages with tragedy, and irreconcilable breakdown, both political and personal, with anger and with mourning. This study gives a detailed approach to Hölderlin's writings on Greek tragedy, especially Sophocles, whom he translated into German, and gives close attention to his poetry, which is never far from an engagement with tragedy. Hölderlin's writings, always fascinating, enable a consideration of the various meanings of tragedy, and provide a new reading of Shakespeare, particularly Julius Caesar, Hamlet and Macbeth; the work proceeds by opening into discussion of Nietzsche, especially The Birth of Tragedy. Since Hölderlin was such a decisive figure for Modernism, to say nothing of modern Germany, he matters intensely to such differing theorists and philosophers as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, all of whose views are discussed herein. Drawing upon the insights of Hegelian philosophy and psychoanalysis, this book gives the English-speaking reader ready access to a magnificent body of poetry and to the poet as a theorist of tragedy and of madness. Hölderlin's poetry is quoted freely, with translations and commentary provided. This book is the first major account of Hölderlin in English to offer the student and general reader a critical account of a vital body of work which matters to any study of poetry and to all who are interested in poetry's relationships to madness. It is essential reading in the understanding of how tragedy pervades literature and politics, and how tragedy has been regarded and written about, from Hegel to Walter Benjamin.
"This is the first book-length study devoted to modern German "author-as-character" fiction set in the Age of Goethe. It shows for the first time in a sustained manner the powerful hold the Goethezeit continues to exercise on the imagination of many of Germany's leading writers. This inner-German dialogue across the ages provides an important corrective to the dominant critical view that contemporary German-language literature is composed primarily under the sign of both globalization and the influence of mass American culture." -- Book cover.
'Opera After the Zero Hour' argues that newly composed opera in West Germany after World War II was a site for the renegotiation of musical traditions during an era in which tradition had become politically fraught.
The first English-language study devoted to Hölderlin's novel in three decades, this book reveals Hyperion's literary and philosophical richness and its complex ties with politics, choreography, and economics.
How can genocide be witnessed through imaginative literature? How can the Holocaust affect readers who were not there? Reading the work of major figures such as Elie Wiesel, Paul Celan, Avrom Sutzkever, Ida Fink, Wladyslaw Szlengel, Itzhak Katzenelson, and Czeslaw Milosz, Poesis in Extremis poses fundamental questions about how prose and poetry are written under extreme conditions, either in real time or immediately after the Holocaust. Framed by discussion of literary testimony, with Wiesel's literary memoir Night as an entry point, this innovative study explores the blurred boundary of fact and fiction in Holocaust literature. It asks whether there is a poetics of the Holocaust and what might be the criteria for literary witnessing. Wartime writing in particular tests the limits of “poesis in extremis” when poets faced their own annihilation and wrote in the hope that their words, like a message in a bottle, would somehow reach readers. Through Poesis in Extremis, Daniel Feldman and Efraim Sicher probe the boundaries of Holocaust literature, as well as the limits of representation.
