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oapen-20.500.12657-621262024-03-27T14:14:46Z Lyric Orientations Eldridge, Hannah Vandegrift Literary studies: poetry and poets Literature: history and criticism thema EDItEUR::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::DS Literature: history and criticism::DSC Literary studies: poetry and poets 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. 2023-03-29T15:50:54Z 2023-03-29T15:50:54Z 2016 book ONIX_20230329_9781501701061_111 9781501701061 9780801479328 9780801456954 9781501701054 https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/62126 eng Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought application/pdf application/epub+zip Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International 9781501701061.pdf 9781501701054.epub http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/html/WYSIWYGfiles/images/9780801456954.jpg Cornell University Press Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library 10.7298/h537-0a78 10.7298/h537-0a78 06a447d4-1d09-460f-8b1d-3b4b09d64407 5cb49704-e598-467a-b720-126dd1d29bf5 9781501701061 9780801479328 9780801456954 9781501701054 Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library 232 Ithaca [...] open access
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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.
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