Karen Leeder

The Cambridge companion to Rilke

Chronology Introduction Karen Leeder and Robert Vilain Part I. Life: 1. Rilke: a biographical exploration Rudiger Gorner 2. The status of the correspondence in Rilkes work Ulrich Baer Part II. Works: 3. Early poems Charlie Louth 4. The new poems William Waters 5. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge Andreas Huyssen 6. The Duino Elegies Kathleen L. Komar 7. The Sonnets to Orpheus Thomas Martinec Part III. Cultural Contexts, Influences, Reception: 8. Rilke and modernism Andreas Kramer 9. Rilke as reader Robert Vilain 10. Rilke and the visual arts Helen Bridge 11. Rilke: thought and mysticism Paul Bishop 12. Rilke and his philosophical critics Anthony Phelan 13. Rilkes legacy in the English-speaking world Karen Leeder Appendix: poem titles Guide to further reading Index Index to Rilkes works.

The Poeta Doctus and the New German Poetry: Raoul Schrott's Tropen

ince 1990 two distinct tendencies have been diagnosed in German literature: S a recuperative concern with real fates and histories, on the one hand, and surrender to a pervasive “Massenkultur,” on the other, a mode where form triumphs over content and commerce is all (Kraft 12). My interest here is in a countercurrent to both of these: young writers, predominantly men, possibly “habilitiert,” who wear their intellectual credentials on their sleeves, and who are actively difficult to read. They espouse none of the “Alltagssprache,” nor the “simple stories” that have been much discussed (especially in prose work). But they are also, for the most part, far from a postmodern dilettantism. For all the contemporaneity of their language and the sensuality of their writing, they are engaged in poetry as “research” in its broadest possible sense, and in this they might be deemed to represent a new breed of “poeta doctus.” This kind of erudite poet-modeled on Horace or Propertius+omes from a rich classical tradition and is one who marries the art of poetry with the gravity of learning. The ideal of the learned poet flourished from humanism and the baroque through to the beginning of the Enlightenment, but it has found a legacy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in naturalism and in classical modernism (cf. Anz; Barner; Block). In the twentieth century at least, the notion has generally been associated with knowledge of the classical literature of Greece and Rome; however, Wilfried Barner, in his study of the subject, proposes five basic identifying characteristics: “Wissenschaftsorientiertheit, Traditionsbildung, Handwerklichkeit und Arbeitsethos, Exklusivitat fur die Verstandigen, Verhaftetsein an Reflexion und Theorie” (728). Although this modem incarnation has brought new developments and new difficulties, the contemporary poeta doctus is confronted with a particularly acute dilemma. If one goes back just a few generations, one finds a certain unity of culture shared by writer and reader based on a general knowledge of both the Old and New Testaments and the Classics. The twentieth century has witnessed the erosion of that common heritage,

Rereading East Germany: The Literature and Film of the GDR

Conference Charge £50................................................... Bed and Breakfast En suite £63 per night Standard Room £48 per night Wednesday 23 ........................................................................................... Thursday 24 ............................................................................................... Friday 25 ................................................................................

Figuring Lateness in Modern German Culture

An interest in “late style” as a category has long been important in musicology and art history. The last decade or so has seen the growing significance of this approach in cultural and literary studies, especially in light of Edward W. Said’s influential volume On Late Style (2006), which brought the ideas into general circulation. This interest both reflects and feeds into the growth of a new discipline that might be termed “humanistic (or cultural) gerontology” and operates at the intersection of humanities, medical science, and social sciences.1 In the United States the new discipline has led the way in analyzing the implication of aging across a broad interdisciplinary spectrum, with numerous publications on aging and creativity, old-age style, “late style,” and the importance for culture and philosophy of the notion of late work. This field has a special resonance in Europe where work is also beginning. If the interest in the United States is arguably led by the aging academy

'NIHILISMUS UND MUSIK': GOTTFRIED BENN (1886-1956) - THE UNLIKELY EXPRESSIONIST

Abstract Gottfried Benn was one of the few representative poets of the twentieth century, while never fitting squarely into any movement. Today his work raises important questions about how we understand Expressionism. Benn was one of the first to take the empirical sciences into his poetry. His ‘Morgue und andere Gedichte’ (1912) was a literary breakthrough that still inspires poets today. However, analogous to the general decline of Expressionism, Benn’s poetry pursued the struggle with modernity into a moral and aesthetic cul de sac that has much to say about the twentieth century and the possibilities of poetry within it.

‘Argo Cargo’: The Role of the Classical Past in Contemporary German Poetry

This chapter examines the background to the ‘classical turn’ in contemporary German-language poetry, and explores how a number of major poets from Brecht onwards take up classical sources. The widespread use of classical motifs by writers like Heiner Müller, Günter Kunert and Volker Braun has been well documented as a way of commenting on the fall of the GDR and the decline of civilisations. Other, younger writers, like Raoul Schrott in his translation of the Ilias (2008) and his controversial Homers Heimat (2008, reissued 2010) or Durs Grünbein in numerous essays (‘Antike und X’, ‘Bruder Juvenal’) and in collections since Nach den Satiren (1999), use their work to explore far-reaching affinities between their own time and antiquity and between their own poetic project and their illustrious forebears. However, recent years have also seen the coincidence of works by a number of female poets (including Barbara Köhler, Brigitte Oleschinski and Ulrike Draesner) taking their inspiration from Homer’s Odyssey and other classical sources. The chapter concludes by introducing some of these briefly before focusing on Köhler, taking its cue from the recent Homer und die deutsche Literatur (2010) to explore the contemporary interest in the refunctioning of the classics and what it means for the poetic and political understanding of the moment.

Durs Grünbein: A Companion

Durs Grunbein is the most significant poet writing in Germany today. No other modern German poet has written from such an emphatically European perspective, and this volume seeks to introduce him to the English-speaking world. Written by a line-up of international scholars, the volume presents highly readable and wide-ranging essays on Grunbeins substantial oeuvre, complemented by specially commissioned material and an interview with the poet. It covers the German and European traditions, memory and cityscapes, the natural sciences, death, love, the visual arts, and presence.

‘Erkenntnistheoretische Maschinen’: Questions about the Sublime in the Work of Raoul Schrott

This paper examines a new mode in recent German poetry. Far from the poetry influenced by the recent re-emergence of ‘pop’ culture, or the ‘Alltagssprache’ and ‘simple Storys’ of much recent writing from the former GDR, a number of poets have concerned themselves with modern science, particularly quantum mechanics and optics. These are among some of the most significant young poets of recent years (Thomas Kling, Franz Josef Czernin, Barbara Kohler, Durs Grunbein, Raoul Schrott etc.), figuring something which might be dubbed a contemporary of the ‘poeta doctus’. This new discourse is interesting enough in itself, as poetry and science have, in the twentieth century at least, often been thought to be diametrically opposed. However, closer examination of this work, particularly that of Raoul Schrott (b. 1964), an ‘emerging’ and, paradoxically, already very distinguished writer, reveals that poetry and science can be understood as pro-foundly analogous; particularly in their use of metaphor. Fascinatingly, the contemporary discourse of science is set alongside classical (mythological) models in his work. They are both understood as finally hopeless projects to humanise the vast indifference of the universe: ‘ein anderes sich in die leere/sagen’. The poem as ‘epistemological machine’ is set to interrogate the places where those human maps, models and vocabularies fail. The real territory of Schrotts work is thus revealed – in Hotels (1995), in essays, in four works of recent prose, and especially in Tropen (1998) – to be the boundaries of perception –sub limes– where the models of human understanding fall away and point beyond themselves to an experience of the ‘sublime’.