H Lderlin And The Poetry Of Tragedy

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.

The definitive scholarly edition and new translation of all three versions of Hölderlin’s poem, The Death of Empedocles, and his related theoretical essays.

This book casts new light on the work of the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770 – 1843), and his translations of Greek tragedy. It shows Hölderlin’s poetry is unique within Western literature (and art) as it retrieves the socio-politics of a Dionysiac space-time and language to challenge the estrangement of humans from nature and one other. In this book, author Lucas Murrey presents a new picture of ancient Greece, noting that money emerged and rapidly developed there in the sixth century B.C. This act of monetization brought with it a concept of tragedy: money-tyrants struggling against the forces of earth and community who succumb to individual isolation, blindness and death. As Murrey points out, Hölderlin (unconsciously) retrieves the battle between money, nature and community and creatively applies its lessons to our time. But Hölderlin’s poetry not only adapts tragedy to question the unlimited “machine process” of “a clever race” of money-tyrants. It also draws attention to Greece’s warnings about the mortal danger of the eyes in myth, cult and theatre. This monograph thus introduces an urgently needed vision not only of Hölderlin hymns, but also the relevance of disciplines as diverse as Literary Studies, Philosophy, Psychology (Psychoanalysis) as well as Religious and Visual (Media) Studies to our present predicament, where a dangerous visual culture, through its support of the unlimitedness of money, is harming our relation to nature and one another. “Here triumphs a temperament guided by ancient religion and that excavates, in Hölderlin’s translations, the central god Dionysus of Greek tragedy.” “Lucas Murrey shares with his subject, Hölderlin, a vision of the Greeks as bringing something vitally important into our poor world, a vision of which few classical scholars are now capable.” —Richard Seaford, author of Money and the Early Greek Mind and Dionysus. “Here triumphs a temperament guided by ancient religion and that excavates, in Hölderlin’s translations, the central god Dionysus of Greek tragedy.” —Bernhard Böschenstein, author of “Frucht des Gewitters”. Zu Hölderlins Dionysos als Gott der Revolution and Paul Celan: Der Meridian. “Lucas Murrey takes the god of tragedy, Dionysus, finally serious as a manifestation of the ecstatic scream of liberation and visual strategies of dissolution: he pleasantly portrays Hölderlin’s idiosyncratic poetic sympathy.” —Anton Bierl, author of Der Chor in der Alten Komödie. Ritual and Performativität “Hölderlin most surely deserved such a book.” —Jean-François Kervégan, author of Que faire de Carl Schmitt? “...fascinating material...” —Noam Chomsky, author of Media Control and Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe.

This book is a full survey of the philosophy of tragedy from antiquity to the present. From Aristotle to Žižek the focal question has been: why, in spite of its distressing content, do we value tragic drama? What is the nature of the 'tragic effect'? Some philosophers point to a certain kind of pleasure that results from tragedy. Others, while not excluding pleasure, emphasize the knowledge we gain from tragedy - of psychology, ethics, freedom or immortality. Through a critical engagement with these and other philosophers, the book concludes by suggesting an answer to the question of what it is that constitutes tragedy 'in its highest vocation'. This book will be of equal interest to students of philosophy and of literature.

Martin Heidegger's 1942 lecture course interprets Friedrich Hölderlin's hymn "The Ister" within the context of Hölderlin's poetic and philosophical work, with particular emphasis on Hölderlin's dialogue with Greek tragedy. Delivered in summer 1942 at the University of Freiburg, this course was first published in German in 1984 as volume 53 of Heidegger's Collected Works. Revealing for Heidegger's thought of the period are his discussions of the meaning of "the political" and "the national," in which he emphasizes the difficulty and the necessity of finding "one's own" in and through a dialogue with "the foreign." In this context Heidegger reflects on the nature of translation and interpretation. A detailed reading of the famous chorus from Sophocles' Antigone, known as the "ode to man," is a key feature of the course.

The place of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) in European literature is assured, and his significance for the development of German philosophy widely acknowledged. Here the focus is more specifically upon his poetics: a body of reflections on the nature of poetry and the meaning of the poet's vocation. These are found in poems and letters, in difficult (and often fragmentary) theoretical writings, and -- in the case of the 'Pindar Fragments' -- texts in which the distinction between poetry and theoretical reflection seems to be overcome. Although Hölderlin's poetics is considered from various points of view, the themes that emerge most frequently are Hölderlin's notion of a 'poetic law' or 'poetic logic', and his conception of tragedy and of what might be called the 'anti-tragic'. Also included is a new translation of Hölderlin's 'Notes' on Sophocles, which are here provided with a commentary. Charles Lewis received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Cambridge University. He has taught at Princeton University, and held an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship at the Free University, Berlin.

In his search to understand the insatiable desire for completeness that patterns so much art and philosophy, Krell investigates the identification of the lunar voice with woman in various roles - lover, friend, sister, shadow, and narrative voice. By reading literary works through a constant dialogue with critical texts, Lunar Voices traces the border between philosophy and literature and expands on issues central to contemporary literary theory.

What is the nature of poetic language when its experience involves an encounter with finitude; with failure, loss, and absence? For Martin Heidegger this experience is central to any thinking that would seek to articulate the meaning of being, but for Friedrich Hölderlin and Maurice Blanchot it is a mark of the tragic and unanswerable demands of poetic language. In Ellipsis, a rigorous, original study on the language of poetry, the language of philosophy, and the limits of the word, William S. Allen offers the first in-depth examination of the development of Heidegger's thinking of poetic language—which remains his most radical and yet most misunderstood work—that carefully balances it with the impossible demands of this experience of finitude, an experience of which Hölderlin and Blanchot have provided the most searching examinations. In bringing language up against its limits, Allen shows that poetic language not only exposes thinking to its abyssal grounds, but also indicates how the limits of our existence come themselves, traumatically, impossibly, to speak.