Heidegger During the Turn: Poetry, Literature, and Education is a text intended for academics and advanced students of philosophy, comparative literature, literary critique, critical theory, and philosophy of education. This book is not exclusively “about” Heidegger’s philosophy per se; for example, it is not focused on explicating Heidegger’s philosophy for the reader. Rather, it is an original work of scholarship offering new and unique readings of literature, poetry, and education interpreted through the conceptual lens of Heidegger’s later philosophy or thinking of the “Turn.” The unique features of the book are as follows: In addition to a detailed critical interpretation of the evolution of the concepts of “history” and “destiny” in Heidegger’s philosophy of the Turn, between the years 1927 and 1955, we explore new perspectives from which to approach topics in literature, poetry, and education from a Heideggerian perspective, facilitating the emergence of the interrelational aspects of our readings. We offer readings that probe new ways of understanding Heidegger’s thought toward, into, and beyond the Turn and, in doing so, fill academic gaps not only in educational research, but also in postmodern interdisciplinary, or, rather, extra-disciplinary, approaches to comparative literature and poetry. The book offers three divergent, but related, ways in which to engage Heidegger’s thinking during the Turn, contributing to the unified attempt to provide for the reader a deep sense of understanding both Heidegger’s later thinking and the specific themes of the three chapters focused on Conrad’s Lord Jim, the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer, and education.
The book consists of an introduction, five main chapters, and an epilogue. The introduction details the “Turn” in Heidegger’s thoughts of the 1930s, focusing on themes and the change to Heidegger’s language in the movement beyond Being and Time (1927) and the fundamental ontology of Dasein. Chapter 1 offers an in-depth analysis of the concept of “destiny” as traced from Being and Time through “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935–36) and Contributions to Philosophy (1936–38). Chapter 2 deepens the interpretation of “destiny” as it evolves in Heidegger’s reading of two German poets, Hölderlin and Rilke (1934–1955). Chapter 3 places the poets Tomas Tranströmer and Arthur Rimbaud in a conversation with Heidegger that attends to the uniqueness of each mode of thought and questions how this mode of thought might provide a possible path beyond the language of metaphysics. Chapter 4 presents a reading of Heidegger and Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim, attempting to think through the text from Heidegger’s notion of the leap and Jim’s jump, or, rather, jumps in the plural, in Conrad’s novel, which includes an interpretation of Heidegger’s notion of Geschick in relation to Lord Jim. Chapter 5 proposes an alternative mode of “meditative” inquiry to the scientific research and “calculative” thinking regimes that govern education on all levels today based on Heidegger’s later works of the “Turn.” In the epilogue we address the concerns surrounding Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism and contemplate the future of continued Heideggerian scholarship within the institutions.