Kristina Mendicino, Interrupting the Origin : Hegel’s Humboldt’s and Hölderlin’s Prophecies of Language, Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures – Yale University, New Haven – Fall 2012.
In her dissertation, Mendicino examines the central role of rhythm in exemplary texts of G.W.F. Hegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich Hölderlin as a response to the problem of the origins of language that had dominated linguistics and cognitive science in the Enlightenment. No longer able to take the Biblical scene of naming for granted, these thinkers nonetheless present rhythm as the movement of language by which it
can meet its limit, suffer its interruption, and spring from its other, be it a god or a passion.
