Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters to a Young Poet (1929–) [DE, EN, FR, GR]

Letters to a Young Poet is a collection of ten letters written by Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) to Franz Xaver Kappus (1883–1966), a 19-year old officer cadet at the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt. Rilke, the son of an Austrian army officer, had studied at the academy’s lower school at Sankt Pölten in the 1890s. Kappus corresponded with the popular poet and author from 1902 to 1908 seeking his advice as to the quality of his poetry, and in deciding between a literary career or a career as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army. Kappus compiled and published the letters in 1929—three years after Rilke’s death from leukemia.

In the first letter, Rilke respectfully declines to review or criticize Kappus’ poetry, advising the younger Kappus that “Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself.” Rilke, over the course of the ten letters proceeds to advise Kappus on how a poet should feel, love, and seek truth in trying to understand and experience the world around him and engage the world of art. These letters offer insight into the ideas and themes that appear in Rilke’s poetry and his working process. Further, these letters were written during a key period of Rilke’s early artistic development after his reputation as a poet began to be established with the publication of parts of Das Stunden-Buch and Das Buch der Bilder. (from Wikipedia)

Publisher Insel Bücherei, Leipzig, 1929
54 pages

English edition
Translated by M.D. Herter Norton
Publisher W.W. Norton, 1934
Revised edition, 1962
ISBN 039300158X
123 pages

Briefe an einen jungen Dichter (German, 1929, no OCR), HTML
Letters to a Young Poet (English, trans. M.D. Herter Norton, 1934/1962)
Lettres à un jeune poète (French, trans. Claude Mouchard and Hans Hartje, 1989)
Γράμματα σ’ ένα νέο ποιητή (Greek, trans. Μάριος Πλωρίτης, 1995)

Astrid Lorange: How Reading is Written: a brief index to Gertrude Stein (2012)

This thesis grows out of a set of interlinked questions to do with reading Gertrude Stein: in particular, how to account for the experience of reading a body of work that is largely resistant to conventional and interpretation-based models of literary criticism. What is being read? What is an effective and explanatory way of writing about the reading experience of a Steinian text? And finally, what constitutes a contemporary critical judgment in relation to an experimental poetics such as Stein’s?

For the one who reads Stein, the question of what is being read is a complex one. If Stein is not writing representationally, then there is no singular meaning to be interpreted. Stein, however, is not writing non-representational poetry as a project in itself. Thus, to read Stein’s work exclusively as a meditation on the plurality of meaning makes for a limited discussion of her poetics. Stein did not regard writing to be a representational or metaphorical process: she regarded it as an aspect of experience and a form of thinking. This study argues that Stein’s work elicits a reading approach that is productive of knowledge.

The thesis seeks to answer the question of how to find a way of writing about the reading of Stein by proposing a series of traverses across selective instances, rather than by engaging interpretative textual methods. These trains of thought are inclusive; they are not necessarily congruent or parallel with each other. It is, rather, a grouping of inter-related concerns. The thesis proposes that a network of understandings can accordingly capture something of the non-normative nature of Stein’s writing as well as the multifarious activities of knowing, unknowing, speaking, eating, resembling, noticing, playing, dancing, walking, forgetting, collecting, teasing, joking, proposing, and writing which, among others, constitute Stein’s oeuvre.

Lastly, and in relation to the final question, this thesis attempts a critical response to the reading of Stein. If reading Stein occasions thinking, then the present study is a record of a reader’s account, as well as a theory of reading. The thesis is structurally and conceptually an index to Stein’s poetics. It reads Stein alongside writers and thinkers across discourses of philosophy, science, queer theory, and literary criticism. In particular, it reads with Alfred North Whitehead, William James, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Karen Barad, Daniel Tiffany, and Sianne Ngai. It aims to construct an intellectual episteme for Stein’s work—one that connects with contemporary contexts as well as repositioning Stein in her moment of transnational modernism.

Doctor of Philosophy
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney, 2012
212 pages

Publisher
Forthcoming as a book (November 2014)

PDF (an unedited version, different from the one to appear as a book)

Wolfgang Ernst, Friedrich Kittler (eds.): Die Geburt des Vokalalphabets aus dem Geist der Poesie: Schrift, Zahl und Ton im Medienverbund (2006) [German]

Daß das Melodische an der Stimme notierbar wurde, ist eine kulturtechnische Leistung der altgriechischen Vokalalphabetisierung der Gesänge Homers. Verblüffenderweise wurden mit diesem Alphabet jedoch nicht nur Sprache und Musik, sondern auch Mathematik und Geometrie angeschrieben. Der interessante Befund liegt darin, daß damit von Beginn an – und einer inhärenten medienästhetischen Logik folgend – “alphanumerisch” avant la lettre operiert wurde. Diese sonst disziplinär entfernten Bereiche medienarchäologisch zusammenzudenken eröffnet eine neue Dimension von Kulturgeschichtsschreibung. Führende Vertreter neuester Forschungen aus den betroffenen Fächern (Altphilologie, Ägyptologie, Archäologie, Epigraphik, Gräzistik, Mathematik und Musikwissenschaft) werden zu diesem Zweck mit Vertretern der Kultur- und Medienwissenschaft – in dieser Form erstmals – ins Gespräch gebracht.

Mit Beiträge von Barry Powell, Rudolf Wachter, Friedrich Kittler, Jesper Svenbro, Wolfgang Rösler, Joachim Quack, Ludwig Morenz, Eva Canik-Kirschbaum, Sandrina Khaled, Gerald Wildgruber, Maarten Bullynck, Thomas Götselius, Joachim Latacz, Martin Carlé und Wolfgang Ernst.

Publisher Wilhelm Fink, Munich, 2006
ISBN 9783770542673
314 pages

Cultural techniques on Monoskop wiki

Publisher

PDF (56 MB, no OCR)
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