A Strange Neighborhood: Poetry and Philosophy

Catalog description

The relationship between poetry and philosophy, as formations of rhetoric of logic, is as ancient as it is vexing. How do the poetic and the conceptual dimensions of our thought and experience stand toward each other? Our course will take up this enigmatic relation by thinking through the implications of Heidegger’s idea of a strange “neighborhood” that unfolds between the poetic and the philosophical. In this enigmatic neighborhood, poetry and philosophy encounter each other in the uncontainable and unpredictable vagaries of language itself. We will examine this Heideggerian thought by turning to a number of test cases in which poets and philosophers stand in fascinating critical dialogue with each other, including Heidegger with Hölderlin and Rilke; Benjamin with Baudelaire; Adorno with Goethe and Heine; and Derrida with Shakespeare and Celan. Curious students from a variety of fields welcome.