Gadamer on Celan

"Who Am I and Who Are You?" and Other Essays

By Hans-Georg Gadamer
Edited and translated by Richard Heinemann & Bruce Krajewski
Introduction by Gerald L. Bruns

Subjects: Poetry
Series: SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy
Paperback : 9780791432303, 190 pages, February 1997
Hardcover : 9780791432297, 190 pages, February 1997
Out of print (Hardcover)

Alternative formats available from:

Read Excerpt View Table of Contents

Request Desk or Examination Copy
Request a Media Review Copy

Table of contents

Introduction: "The Remembrance of Language: An Introduction to Gadamer's Poetics," by Gerald L. Bruns

Abbreviations

Editors' Preface

Foreword to Who Am I and Who Are You?

Foreword to the Revised Edition

Who Am I and Who Are You?

Epilogue to Who Am I and Who Are You?

Epilogue to the Revised Edition

Meaning and Concealment of Meaning in Paul Celan

A Phenomenological and Semantic Approach to Celan?

Index of Names

Brings together all of Gadamer's published writings on Celan's poetry, and makes them available in English for the first time. This is accessible commentary on a notoriously difficult poet.

Description

Gadamer on Celan makes all of Hans-Georg Gadamer's published writings on Paul Celan's poetry available in English for the first time. Gadamer's commentaries on Celan's work are explicitly meant for a general audience, and they are further testimony to Celan's growing importance in world literature since the Second World War. Celan's poetry has attracted the attention of many well-known figures, including Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Edmond Jabe`s, Otto Poggeler, and George Steiner. As Steiner has said, "It will take a long time for our sensibilities to apprehend poetry of these dimensions and this radicality." Gadamer's commentaries will help readers to listen to Celan's poetry, and to become acquainted with his only book-length commentary on a poet, using the best example of Gadamer's thinking on the relationship of philosophy and poetry.

This book also contains a translation of Who Am I and Who Are You?, the centerpiece of Gadamer's most important philosophical project since the publication of Truth and Method (1960). Who Am I and Who Are You? demonstrates Gadamer's continual engagement with the key figures of twentieth-century thought, and his responsiveness to the challenges of modernist art and its various affronts to hermeneutics.

Hans-Georg Gadamer is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Heidelberg. Richard Heinemann received his PH.D. in German Studies and Social Thought from the University of Chicago, and is a freelance translator. Bruce Krajewski is Associate Professor of English and Film at Laurentian University. Author of a number of books on philosophical hermeneutics including Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern, Gerald L. Bruns is William and Hazel White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.