Oxford Rilke Seminars - Hilary Term
Tuesday evenings at 5.30 pm in Christ Church, Oxford
1st week - 17 January
Judith Ryan (Harvard University) The Problem of Completeness in Rilke's Late Poetry
2nd week - 24 January
Katrin Kohl (Jesus College, Oxford) The Poetic Dialogue between Rilke and Erika Mitterer [Groundbreaking paper offering fruitful approach to the epistolary poem sequence as a form of dialogue. Fascinating examination of the false boundaries erected between reality and the imaginary; of the poet as reader; and of the dialogue's destabilising of 'du' and 'ich' identities.]
3rd week - 31 January
Marielle Sutherland (Oxford Brookes University) The Sound and Silence of the Text of Death: Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus
4th week - 7 February
Charlie Louth (The Queen's College, Oxford) Versions of Pastoral in Late Rilke [on Rilke's Georgics, especially 'Das kleine Weinjahr' and the poetological fragment 'Von meiner Antwort weiss ich noch nicht / wann ich sie sagen werde./ Aber, horch eine Harke, die schon schafft. / Oben allein in dem Weinberg spricht / schon ein Mann mit der Erde'. ]
5th week - 14 February
Helen Bridge (University of Exeter) The Problem of Abstraction: Rilke's Late Poetry and Modern Visual Art [An interesting analysis of a gulf between the aesthetic of Rilke's late poetry and the ideas he expressed in letters at the time about modern art. Using Klee as the primary point of reference, the poems 'Die Frucht', and Sonette an Orpheus I,11 and I, 12 were read as negotiations of modernist abstraction. ]
6th week - 21 February
Ben Hutchinson (St John's, Oxford / Marbach am Neckar) 'Ankunft': A Late Poem, or an Early Preoccupation
7th week - 28 February
Leonard Olschner (Queen Mary, University of London) Interior Landscapes in Rilke's Late Poetry [a rich survey of the poets and intellectuals at the time of Rilke's late poetry]
8th week - 7 March
Naomi Segal (Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, London) 'O dieses ist das Tier, das es nicht gibt': Unicorns in Early and Late Rilke [Reading Malte reading the tapestries of the maidens with the unicorn, alongside the two Rilke poems]
