 | Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity Subjects: Kleist Heinrich von 1777–1811 -- Criticism and interpretation; Kleist Heinrich von 1777–1811 -- Appreciation; Kant Immanuel 1724–1804 -- Influence; Modernism (Literature); New essays employing a multitude of approaches to the works of Kleist, in the process shedding light on our present modernity. Modernity, according to some views, poses the problem of homo politicus -- the problem of how to act in a moral universe without a "master narrative," without a final foundation. From this angle, the oeuvre of Heinrich vonKleist -- novellas, dramas, and essays -- addresses problems emerging from a new universe of Kantian provenance, in many ways the same universe we inhabit today. This volume of new essays investigates Kleist's position in ourever-changing conception of modernity, employing aesthetic, narrative, philosophical, biographical, political, economic, anthropological, psychological, and cultural approaches and wrestling with the difficulties of historicizingKleist's life and work. Central questions are: To what extent can the multitude of breaking points and turning points, endgames and pre-games, ruptures and departures that permeate Kleist's work and biography be conceptually bundled together and linked to the emerging paradigm of modernity? And to what extent does such an approach to Kleist not only advance understanding of this major German writer and his work, but also shed light on the nature of our present modernity? Contributors: Seán Allan, Peter Barton, Hilda Meldrum Brown, David Chisholm, Andreas Gailus, Bernhard Greiner, Jeffrey L. High, Anette Horn, Peter Horn, Wolf Kittler, Jonathan W. Marshall, Christian Moser, Dorothea von Mücke, Nancy Nobile, David Pan, Ricarda Schmidt, Helmut J. Schneider. Bernd Fischer is Professor of German at the Ohio State University. Tim Mehigan is Professor of German in the Department of Languagesand Cultures at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Fischer Bernd : BERND FISCHER is Emeritus Academy Professor at the Ohio State University.Fischer Bernd : BERND FISCHER is Emeritus Academy Professor at the Ohio State University.Moser Christian : CHRISTIAN MOSER is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Bonn.Schneider Helmut J. : HELMUT J. SCHNEIDER is Professor (emeritus) für neuere deutsche Literaturwissenschaft an der Universität Bonn. He has also held positions at the University of California, Irvine und Davis. He has published widely on German literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the European pastoral tradition, utopian landscapes, the literature of the Enlightenment and on German neoclassicism (in particular on Lessing, Kleist, Goethe). His most recent monograph is Genealogie und Menschheitsfamilie: Dramaturgie der Humanität von Lessing bis Büchner (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2011).High Jeffrey L. : JEFFREY L. HIGH is Professor of German Studies at California State University, Long BeachAllan Seán : SEÁN ALLAN is Professor of German at the University of St Andrews. He studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and at the Humboldt Universität in what was then East Berlin. From 2001-2016 he worked at the University of Warwick before moving to St Andrews in 2016 as Professor of German. His main research areas regard the culture of the European Enlightenment, interdisciplinary approaches to the mediation of music and the visual arts, as well as translation and translation studies. He is the author of The Plays of Heinrich von Kleist: Ideals and Illusions (1996) and The Stories of Heinrich von Kleist: Fictions of Security (Camden House, 2001). He is the co-editor of a special edition of German Life and Letters, entitled Heinrich von Kleist: Performance and Performativity (2011); the co-editor of the volumes Kleist, Education and Violence: The Transformation of Ethics and Aesthetics and Konstruktive und destruktive Funktionen von Gewalt im Werk Heinrich von Kleists (2012), and Re-Imagining DEFA: East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts (2016); and the co-author of the monograph Unverhoffte Wirkungen: Erziehung und Gewalt im Werk Heinrich von Kleists (2014). His most recent book, Screening Art: Modernism and the Socialist Imaginary in East German Cinema (2019), investigates questions of intermediality and spans not only film, but also literature, music, and the visual arts in post-war cinema.Kittler Wolf : WOLF KITTLER is Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published widely with monographs on Franz Kafka and Heinrich von Kleist. Recent publications on Impressionism as an effect of the chemical dye industry, on the history of the Greek alphabet from Euripides to Plato, on early wireless technology, on music in Jean Jacques Rousseau's work, on the history of the concept of "risk," and on transformations in perspective painting from Leon Battista Alberti to Salvador Dalí. Works in progress include: On Wings of Light: A Cultural History of Telecommunication from Antiquity to the Present , and Echo's Echoes: From Freud to Lacan . |
