Hölderlin’s Quake

Abstract Hölderlin’s QuakeThis essay addresses the crisis of representation that affects literary and cultural studies, signaled here by the word “quake.” The word is quoted in the film Roter Himmel (Afire, 2023) and directs our attention not only to the unfolding ecological catastrophe but more pointedly to the tradition of the lyric, its movement from form to fragment, made explicit in Hölderlin’s late poems. The “quake of representation” alluded to in the film highlights the problem of reading, especially in Hölderlin poems where the “quake” has shattered normative modes of reference and poetic form devolves into the fragment. Hölderlin’s poems aim for the promise of presence and come to a progressive fracturing of the form that might, and cannot, enable it. The “quake of representation” is the story of the fragment, of poetry moving between presence and silence, of impossible mourning at untellable loss, and of “madness” at the edge of speech. Helen Regueiro Elam Associate Professor, Dept. of English SUNY – University at Albany.