Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus

Written in three weeks of creative inspiration, Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (1923) is well known for its enigmatic power and lyrical intensity. The essays in this volume forge a new path in illuminating the philosophical significance of this late masterpiece. Contributions illustrate the unique character and importance of the Sonnets, their philosophical import, as well as their significant connections to the Duino Elegies (completed in the same period).The volume features eight essays by philosophers, literary critics, and Rilke scholars, which approach a number of the central themes and motifs of the Sonnets as well as the significance of their formal and technical qualities. An introductory essay (co-authored by the editors) situates the book in the context of philosophical poetics, the reception of Rilke as a philosophical poet, and the place of the Sonnets in Rilke's oeuvre.Above all, this volume's premise is that an interdisciplinary approach to poetry and, more specifically, to Rilke's Sonnets, can facilitate crucial insights with the potential to expand the horizons of philosophy and criticism. Essays elucidate the relevance of the Sonnets to such wide-ranging topics as phenomenology and existentialism, hermeneutics and philosophy of language, philosophy of mythology, metaphysics, Modernist aesthetics, feminism, ecocriticism, animal ethics, and the philosophy of technology.

Chapter 1. IntroductionHannah Vandegrift Eldridge and Luke FischerPart I: Interiority, World-Disclosure, and ConstructivismChapter 2. On Inwardness and Place in Rilke's Sonnets to OrpheusJames D. ReidChapter 3. Rilke on Formally Disclosing the Meaning of ThingsRick Anthony FurtakChapter 4. The Modernism of The Sonnets to Orpheus: Abstraction and FiguralityHannah Vandegrift EldridgePart II: Death, Love, and the BeyondChapter 5. Beyond Existentialism: The Orphic Unity of Life and DeathLuke FischerChapter 6. Love in Paramyth: On Rilke's Figuration of the Orpheus-MythChristoph JammeChapter 7. The Feminine in Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus: A Philosophy of Productive DeprivationKathleen L. KomarPart III: Ecocriticism and Animal EthicsChapter 8. The Imaginative Ecology of Rilke's Sonnets to OrpheusJennifer Anna Gosetti-FerenceiChapter 9. The Pozzo Sonnet: Rilke and the Killing of the DovesDavid BrooksIndex