Reading Schedule — Friedrich Hölderlin, Poetry and Prose

Material marked with * can be accessed here

Week 1, January 16 – Introduction

Introduction in Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments (transl. M. Hamburger)  

In my boyhood days… (27); *My Resolution and Kepler; *Greece

Week 2, January 23 – Intellectual intuition – Imaginative reflection

Odes and Epigrams (3-9), *Thalia Fragment

Essays: There is a natural state (227); On the Concept of Punishment (229); Being Judgment Possibility (231)

Letters: #1, 14, 19, 20, 23, 24, 28, 30

* Weatherby, The Tragic Task: Dialectical Organs and the Metaphysics of Judgment (Hölderlin).

Week 3, January 30 – “Mythopoetics”

12 Programmatical Odes: Then and Now (9) to The Sanctimonious Poets (17), To Our Great Poets (17) Hyperion’s Song of Fate (25); The Traveller (137), In Socrates’ Times (317), *Once Gods walked…, *To The Sun Gods

Essays: Hermocrates to Cephalus (233); The Standpoint… (246)

Letters: #10, 34, 37, 43, 46, 47, 49, 67

* Fischer, Hölderlin’s Mythopoetics: From ‘Aesthetic Letters’ to the New Mythology

Week 4, February 6 – Hyperion

*Hyperion, or the Hermit in Greece (Transl. WR Trask) – experts (TBA)

Letters: #79, 44, 45, 46, 51,52, 58

* Laplanche, Hyperion’s Dual Dialectic

Week 5, February 13 – Der Baum entwächst…  

Man (23), The Spirit of the Age (29), In the Morning (33), Go down the lovely sun (43), Sunset (17), Her recovery (61), Nature and Art (75), The Poet’s Courage (99), *The Gods, *The Oak trees, *If I heeded

Essays: Seven Maxims (240); From a Draft to A journal Plan (254); Oldest Program for a System of German Idealism (341)

Letters: # 58, 62, 63, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74,75, 77, 78

* Nancy, The Calculation of the Poet

Week 6, February 20 – The free use of what is our own…

Menon’s Lament for Diotima (127), Diotima (65), Stuttgart (143), Rousseau (49), The Course of Life (59), The Departed (71), The Ancestral Portrait (69), Exhortation (73), The Voice of the People (83), *The People were silent

Essays: I was slumbering, my Callias, … (225); Does the idealic catastrophe… (307-10); Fragment of Philosophical Letters (On Religion) (234)

Letters: #67, 106

*deMan, The Image of Rousseau in Hölderlin

Week 7, February 27 – Reading Week, no meeting, but watch:

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub’s “Der Tod des Empedocles” (link to follow)

Week 8, March 5 – To become one with…

The Death of Empedocles, First Version (35)

* Byg, Language in Exil: Hölderlin’s The Death of Empedocles

Week 9, March 12 – To become one with… cont.

The Death of Empedocles, Third Version (169)

Essays: The Ground of the Empedocles (258)

Letters: #99, 100, 101, 102, 103,

* Krell, Voices of Empedocles

Week 19, March 19 – Wenn er die Zeiten erneut

The Rhine (197), The Ister (253), At the source of the Danube (177), The Fettered River (103), The River Main (35), The Neckar (53), Sung beneath the Alps (77)

Essays: When the poet (277); Feeling speaks in a poem (299); The expression, the characteristics (301); The lyric… (302)

Letters: #104-108

* Hamacher, Parousia, Stone-Walls: Mediacy and Temporality, Late Hölderlin

Week 11, March 26 – Das Lebendige in Poetry (The living in poetry)

The Archipelago (111), Bread and Wine (151), Evening Fantasy (31), Celebration of Peace (209), My Possessions (37), Homecoming (159), As if on a holiday (175), German Song (265)

Essays: On the Different Modes of Poetic Composition (254); The tragic poet (311); The meaning of tragedies (316);

Letters: #108, 110, 113

* Benjamin, Two poems

Week 12, April 2 – Götternacht

The Journey (183), Remembrance (211), Patmos (231), The Only One (versions 1&2) (219), * The Only One (3rd version), Germania (189), Mnemosyne (259), Night songs: Chiron/Tears/To Hope/Vulcan (91-97)/Timidness (101)/Ganymede (105)/The Ages of Life/Half of Life/The Nook of Hardt (171-73)

Essays: On the Fable of the Ancients (333); The declining fatherland… (271)

Letters: #114

* Hamacher, The Trace of Transgression

Week 13, April 9 – Life as Fragment

Fragments of other hymns (267ff), If from the distance ... (325); *In lovely blue,

Essays: The Pindar Fragments (334)

Letters: #115

Other: *Agamben, Epilogue