TY - BOOK ID - 78010707 TI - Lyric Orientations : Hölderlin, Rilke, and the Poetics of Community PY - 2016 SN - 1501701053 1501701061 9781501701061 9780801456954 0801456959 9780801479328 0801479320 PB - Cornell University Press DB - UniCat KW - German poetry KW - History and criticism. KW - Rilke, Rainer Maria, KW - Hölderlin, Friedrich, KW - Criticism and interpretation. KW - Rilke, René Maria Cäsar, KW - Li-erh-kʻo, KW - Rielke, Rainer Maria, KW - Rilkʻe, Rainŏ Maria, KW - Rilḳeh, Rainer Mariyah, KW - Rilke, Reiner Marie, KW - רילקה, ראינר מריה, KW - רילקה, ריינר מריה KW - רילקה, ריינר מריה, KW - רילקה, רינר מריה KW - רילקה, רינר מריה, KW - רילקה, רץ מ. KW - רילקה, ר.מ KW - Hölderlin, Friedrich KW - Gelʹderlin, Fridrikh, KW - Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich, KW - Kholʹderlin, Fridrikh, KW - Holderlin, Frederich, KW - הלדרלין, פרידריך, KW - Literature: history & criticism UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:78010707 AB - 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. ER -