Heidegger and Literary Studies

The volume shows how both the distinction and connection between literature and poetry is staged within Heidegger's thought.

Andrew Benjamin (Edited by)

9781316513101, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 November 2023

386 pages
23.6 x 15.5 x 2.6 cm, 0.69 kg

'… of great use for specialists working on bridging the fields of literary studies and Heideggerian philosophy. … Highly recommended.' A. Jaeger, CHOICE

Martin Heidegger is one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th Century, and a key philosophical resource for literary critics. Not only has he written about poetry, generations of poets have engaged his writings. And yet, for Heidegger poetry and literature are separate. An essential part of the project of this book therefore is to show how both the distinction and connection between literature and poetry is staged within Heidegger's thought. It offers Heidegger's perspective on a range of key themes, topics, poets, and writers, including Poetry and Poetics, Ancient Greek theatre and tragedies and then specifically Friedrich Hölderlin, Thomas Mann, Paul Celan, Euripides and Sophocles. As the Chapters comprising this book make clear, Heidegger's work remains indispensable for any serious engagement with either literature or poetry today.

Introduction Andrew Benjamin
Part I. Literature and Poetry
1. Heidegger's literary secret Joseph Cohen
2. The event's foreign vernacular: Denken and Dichten in Heidegger Krzysztof Ziarek
3. Shared habits: love, time and the magic mountain in 1925 Ben Morgan
4. From tool to poem: the emergence of the antagonism between technics and poetry in Heidegger's work Justin Clemens
5. Heidegger's use of poetry Christophe Fynsk
Part II. Heidegger and Greek Literature: 6. Heidegger and sophocles: Antigone's Êthos of intimating and waiting Sean Kirkland
7. Playing with shadows in Heidegger's reading of Greek tragedy: encountering Oedipus, Antigone and (absent) Medea Silvia Benso
Part III. Heidegger and Literary Works: 8. Places of pain: Heidegger's reading of Trakl Claudia Baracchi
9. The (Im)possibility of homecoming: Heidegger, Celan and the Aporia of language Charles Bambach
10. Heidegger and Blanchot: 'Wherefore poets in time of distress?' (Hölderlin, Rilke)' Leslie Hill
11. Thomas Mann and Martin Heidegger: two distinct paths of the 'conservative revolution' in Germany Ingo Farin
12. Travels in Greece: Heidegger and Henry Miller Andrew Mitchell
13. Hölderlin's Heidegger, Heidegger's Mourning David Ferris.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]