Rilke in Frame

This paper probes the connections between Rainer Maria Rilke and Janet Frame, emphasizing the temperamental and aesthetic similarities linking the two writers, and examining in particular the differential quality which informs an approach to prose-writing characterized by its constant gesturing towards poetry. While Frame's recourse to a modernist idiom seems to privilege an intense focus on her own artistic medium, felt to be divorced from any easily recognizable existential reality, it can be shown that her linguistic utopia, unlike Rilke's, finally fails to incorporate the promise of a restoration of reference or 'fullness' that would follow upon its realization within the text