| Our thesis contains a double problematic: on the one hand, we contextualize philosophical problems within literary genre and on the other hand, we concern ourselves with the question of genre. More specifically, we rethink the poetic, dramatic corpus of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) around the concept of the poem-play, a term that we invented to show the generic, conceptual and figural relations within literary form. In this respect we take a dialectical approach, one that refers back to the antinomy of Kant and reemerges in twentieth century interpretations of genre discernable in the writings of Walter Benjamin, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Theodor Adorno and Giorgio Agamben. The poetic, dramatic works which are the center of our study are Hölderlin's Der Tod des Empedokles ("The Death of Empedokles") (1798-1800), his translation of Sophocles' Antigone (1804) (in particular, the lyrical dialogues and choral odes) and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1820). In addition, we examine each poet’s theoretical writings on genre, highlighting especially the relation of tragedy and the lyric. As a literary genre, the poem-play, which doesn't exist, connotes many things: problem-play, mixed, dual, composite, fragmentary, or hybrid genre; assemblage, totality, etc. We like to think of it as a border genre because this allows us to explore the different levels of relation alluded to above. In the history of Romantic criticism and interpretation there have been surprisingly little comparative studies dedicated to Shelley and Hölderlin. Moreover, to our knowledge, there are no existent studies which have focused on each poet's respective affinities to poetic, dramatic forms. Hence, we hope that our research will open up new paths in the domains of Shelley and Hölderlin criticism in addition to inviting further work on the antinomical tendencies in genre within and beyond the Romantic canon. |
