Description:
This collection of 15 essays by distinguished international scholars reconsiders what Friedrich Hölderlin's work reveals about the impulses toward form and formlessness in nature and the role that poetry plays in creating Holderlin's 'harmonious opposition'.
Brief description: Rochelle Tobias is Professor of German at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) and is co-editor of Phenomenology to the Letter: Husserl and Literature (de Gruyter, 2019).
Review Quotes: This rigorous, well-written study gives special attention to how Hölderin differed from his idealist contemporaries (especially Fichte and Schelling), but many readers may find it rewarding to contemplate how he seems to fall between Herder and Nietzsche in the development of the philosophy of history. [...] Summing Up: Recommended.The contributions in the volume respond to this programmatic framework by taking Hölderlin's work in different -and sometimes even oppes-directions. What emerges from the collection is thus not Hölderlin's philosophy of nature but Hölderlin's nature-philosophies. (...) The success of the volume consists in its reconsideration of Hölderlin's poetry as indicative of a speculative project that is not yet complete, one that brings into articulation forms of nature that exceed and yet, some-how ground (or unground) the human being in exploratory and often contradictory ways (...).--Gabriel Trop