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GERMAN STUDIES: NEW PERSPECTIVES
SPEAKER: Alexander Sorenson, Binghamton University
Among the many gripping features of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (1923), arguably few are more pertinent to our current moment than the Ninth Elegy’s portrayal of a crisis in the human relation to objects as well as to nature—a crisis, in other words, of “home” (oikos). Rilke’s poem enigmatically declares that the things of the world are “ceasing,” but that the only way to rescue them from this fate is to make them “invisible.” In order to try and make sense of this somewhat mysterious commission of care, I will draw upon modern thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-Luc Marion in examining how Rilke’s elegy shows hymnic language—and specifically the praise of transience—to play a crucial role in the “poethics” of care. This dimension of the Ninth Elegy articulates an original and crucially relevant vision of an authentically ecological relation to phenomena: namely, one constituted by a love of the world (amor mundi) that is grounded in loss rather than possession, and that thereby calls us to reconceptualize this world and what it means for us to have our home in it.
About the Speaker
Alexander Sorenson (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2019) teaches German and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University. His research and teaching interests center upon interdisciplinary themes and issues related to the environmental humanities, such as the interface between philosophy, literature, art, and the history of science. His first book project, The Waiting Water: Order, Sacrifice and Submergence in German Realism, is forthcoming with Cornell University Press in the Signale series, and he is also in the early stages of a second research project about the concept of “sacramental ecology” in the long 19th century. Along with recently published articles derived from this newer work (on the poetry of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and Rainer Maria Rilke, in Literature & Theology and Forum for Modern Language Studies, respectively), his essays have also appeared in The German Quarterly, German Life and Letters, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
