GERST 6340 - German Romanticism

Spring. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Most readings in German, though some translations exist; discussions in English. This is a German Studies Anchor Course, but students in other disciplines and languages are encouraged to participate.

G. Waite.

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.