GERST 6340

German Romanticism

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2018-2019.

This graduate seminar introduces major authors, themes, and problems in European--also German--literature, philosophy, art, and critical theory from ca. 1770 to 1830. This, our own, legacy includes: Europe and North America (including Haiti) between and in revolutions. Writers thus include: Toussaint L'Ouveture, Kleist, the Schegel brothers, Fichte, Schelling. Also Tieck, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Novalis, etc. So-called secondary literature includes: Marx and Engels on the "German ideology"; Lukács on the "flight from reality" and "Romantic philosophy of life: Novalis"; Freud on the "uncanny"; Heidegger on "the other beginning" and the "essence of human freedom" (in Hoelderlin, also in Schelling and Nietzsche); Adorno on "parataxis" (in Hoelderin); Balibar (on the "internal border" in Fichte); Paul de Man (on the "rhetoric of romanticism"); Lacoue-Labarthe& Nancy (on the "literary absolute," following W. Benjamin);"the absorption of the subject" in painting (M. Fried); the "war machine" (Deleuze & Guattari); and the "crisis of reproduction" (Althusser)--the latter also involving not only sexuality and class struggle in all known forms, but also reading and seeing, feeling, thinking and acting.

When Offered Spring.

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