Reversion:Lyric Time(s) II

Is a history of the lyric even conceivable? What would a lyrictemporality look like? With a focus on Rainer Maria Rilke’s decision not to translate, but rather to rewrite Dante’s Vita nova(1293–1295) in the first of his Duineser Elegien (1912), the essay deploys reversion (as turning back, return, coming around again), alongside re-citation, as a keyword that can unlock the transhistorical operations of the lyric as the re-enactment of selected gestures under different circumstances.Francesco Giusti, ‘Reversion: Lyric Time(s) II’, in Re-: An Errant Glossary, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 15 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2019), pp. 151-61