Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

"I find myself in complete agreement with the move, in Lyric Orientations, to employ the work of the philosopher Stanley Cavell in approaching Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke. Reading Hölderlin and Rilke within this philosophical framework allows Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge to suggest a fresh, much needed, and highly convincing alternative to the dominant Hölderlin and Rilke scholarship of recent decades that has focused on poetic expression as marking the difficulty if not inability of language to engage the world. Whereas philosophers such as Heidegger and Derrida and literary critics such as Paul de Man or Werner Hamacher read the work of Hölderlin and Rilke as marking a tension between language and its referents, and thus between poetic language and the realm of living, acting, speaking human beings, Eldridge displays how Hölderlin and Rilke actually offer in their work manners of meaningful engagement with and active participation in the world."

Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

"I find myself in complete agreement with the move, in Lyric Orientations, to employ the work of the philosopher Stanley Cavell in approaching Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke. Reading Hölderlin and Rilke within this philosophical framework allows Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge to suggest a fresh, much needed, and highly convincing alternative to the dominant Hölderlin and Rilke scholarship of recent decades that has focused on poetic expression as marking the difficulty if not inability of language to engage the world. Whereas philosophers such as Heidegger and Derrida and literary critics such as Paul de Man or Werner Hamacher read the work of Hölderlin and Rilke as marking a tension between language and its referents, and thus between poetic language and the realm of living, acting, speaking human beings, Eldridge displays how Hölderlin and Rilke actually offer in their work manners of meaningful engagement with and active participation in the world."