GERST 6340

German Romanticism

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2024-2025.

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 Schlegel 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 Hölderlin, also in Schelling and Nietzsche); Adorno on "parataxis" (in Hölderin); 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.

Comments This is a German Studies Anchor Course. Most readings are in German, though some translations exist. Students in other disciplines and languages are encouraged to participate.

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