| This study locates the turn-of-the-century "language crisis" in German poetry within its much larger historical and linguistic framework, namely the perennial question of the relationship between language and thought. I begin with an analysis of Plato's Cratylus, a work often alluded to in the secondary literature regarding language crisis. Especially interesting is Cratylus's renouncement of language in his later life. This allows one to argue for the Cratylus as the first language-crisis text, thus predating Hofmannsthal's "Chandos Brief," the quintessential language-crisis text, by circa twenty-three centuries.;Between the ancient Greeks and turn-of-the-century Vienna, there is a rich debate on how dependent language is on reality and to what extent human cognition is reliant on language for its perception of reality. By the twentieth century this debates reaches the conclusion that there is an interdependent relationship between language and thought.;In the secondary literature on Hofmannsthal's "Chandos Brief" it is argued that Hofmannsthal uses the "Chandos Brief" to overcome his own language crisis. One common view is: through the imagery of metaphor and its ability to show more than ordinary language can say, this crisis is overcome. Winnicott postulates the existence of an intermediary zone, a psychic zone formed during subject genesis which reconnects the ego and id. Within this realm of cultural and symbolic experience, Schwab includes metaphor. Schwab claims that metaphor raises communication above the ordinary language because it contains both conscious and unconscious meaning.;Rainer Maria Rilke is then examined as a language-crisis writer and interpreted in the light of Schwab's theory. His Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge has many parallels to Hofmannsthal's "Chandos Brief." Rilke's continually evolving aesthetics are also examined from his early poems to his Dinggedichte, to the Weltinnenraum of his later poems, especially the Duineser Elegien and Die Sonnette an Orpheus. After close examination, we discover that Rilke's aesthetic development surprisingly parallels that of subject genesis, and that his Weltinnenraum can be remarkably equated with the intermediary zone. |
