Lecture by Christoph König, June 21, 2015

Christoph König is professor of German Literature at the University of Osnabrück and a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His research focuses on questions of literary methodology and the historical and disciplinary conditions of interpretation. He has published a number of academic studies in German and French.

LECTURES SCEPTIQUES DES «SONNETS À ORPHÉE» DE RILKE / A SCEPTICAL READING OF RILKE’S “SONNETS TO ORPHEUS”

Christoph König will read from his most recent book, which takes as its theme the poem «O komm und geh» (O come and go) from the Sonnets to Orpheus. His aim is twofold. He offers an interpretation of the poem while making manifest the conditions of his interpretation. His reading considers Rilke’s idiomatic expressions, his idiosyncratic appropriation of the literary tradition, his correspondence, the 55 sonnets as his sonoric world and, most importantly, his poetry’s self-reflexivity. He draws a novel picture of Rilke. In place of the popular, esoteric, philosophical, or mystical author, König sets the skeptic, a poet whose oeuvre interrogates the very conditions of possibility of poetic knowledge become tangible.

Audio recording

Lecture in French