Reading and re -presenting Rilke: Orphic identity and poetic invention

My study of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) tackles issues of identity construction in terms of the poet's understanding of the malleable nature of identity, while simultaneously addressing the question of Rilke's place in literary history. In line with contemporary literary and critical theory which views the “self” as a societal “construction” and strategic narrative device within language, this dissertation examines Rilke's preoccupations with identity and self-consciousness in his work, as he investigates the disintegration of personality, the instability and the fragility of the subjective self in the modern world.;Rilke's re-reading of mythological figures, such as Orpheus and Narcissus, in modern, psychological terms, as well as in terms of traditional poetics, are keys not only to Rilke's poetics and his changing understanding of “self,” but also to his evolving critique of society. Rilke's Orphic work disengages traditional patterns of perceptions, not only to decenter fidelity to history, but to recover the power of traditional elements from that history to help one articulate one's subjectivity. While earlier parts of Rilke's oeuvre follow in the modernist vein of resisting the fragmentation or loss of the self, his later work Rilke espouses also a vision of poetic life and regeneration beyond the death of the solitary individual that encompasses an expression of secularized mysticism that enacts a celebration of the dispersal, death, and loss of self and the tearing off of the disguises of self which conceal its naturalized, artificial origins.;Rilke's intertextuality of Orpheus thus anticipates a postmodern narrative and treats identity not in terms of the socially-constructed personae, but as a pre-linguistic, polymorphous phenomenon in its acceptance of the multivalent-self or selves, a reading far closer to the postmodern than to the modern. Rilke's presentation of newly revised and secularized cultural forms sought to provide the individual with a greater sense of social cohesion—he deconstructs the western traditions, in order to reconstruct a space for the various voices in the collective in an age of increasing modernist fragmentation.