Dr Ian Cooper from the Department of German will be giving an invited lecture at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Durham on Thursday 27 February. The lecture forms part of the ‘Languages of Light’ series hosted by the research group Literature, History, Theory.
The title of the lecture is ‘Tenebrae, Lightenings: Poetry in the Clearing’. Dr Cooper will be discussing two modern poets – Paul Celan and Seamus Heaney – in the context of Heidegger’s thought about the ‘clearing’. Celan and Heaney share a deep affinity with the Heideggerian idea of absence shaping all significant presence, and articulate this in poetry that is rich in movements of light and darkness. Especially the notion of the clearing – the empty space in which Being manifests itself – provides terms for reading their work together.
In the first half of the talk, he will suggest a new reading of one of Celan’s best known poems, ‘Tenebrae’, in relation to Heidegger’s thoughts about the fate of Being in modernity as laid out in his work on technology, seeing ‘Tenebrae’ as offering a response to some of Heidegger’s deepest claims. The second half of the talk will take ‘Tenebrae’ as a frame for looking at Heaney’s poetic sequences ‘Clearances’ and ‘Lightenings’, in which the theme of light is used to express ‘unconcealment’ (in Heidegger’s sense). At the same time these poems go beyond Heidegger, and join up with Celan, in their understanding of finitude and gift. Other poets touched on in the talk include Hölderlin, George Herbert and Philip Larkin.
To find our more about the lecture, please contact Caitrion Nidhuill at Durham, via caitriona.nidhuill@durham.ac.uk