GERST 6340

German Romanticism

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2025-2026 Catalog.

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; Lukacs 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 Holderlin, also in Schelling and Nietzsche); Adorno on parataxis (in Holderin); 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.

Last 4 Terms Offered 2025SP, 2021FA, 2019SP, 2016SP

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