Since the beginning of Western philosophical thinking in ancient Greece, philosophy has had a productive and problematic relationship with literature, especially poetry. Plato famously commented on "the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry" and wanted poetry banned from the city for its presumed betrayal of truth. If poetry is characterized by feeling, subjectivity, metaphor, and pure form and philosophy by reason, abstraction, logic, and objective truth, where and how do the two intersect? This course will investigate the rivalry and attraction between these two genres by focusing on modern poets such as Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Stefan George, as well as two poets who have particularly fascinated modern philosophers: Friedrich Hölderlin and Paul Celan. We will read selected poems and analyze a variety of philosophical responses to those poems by 20th-century and contemporary German and French philosophers. |