|
Education
Ph.D. 1994 University of California, Berkeley, Comparative Literature
Research Interests
- Embodied Cognition and Aesthetic Imagination
In the past few years, I have become more and more curious about the question of the embodiment of thought, and I have been exploring ways of making concepts and procedures developed in phenomenology and cognitive science fruitful for the study of literature, aesthetic theory, and philosophy. I do this in four related projects.
-
A book-in-progress provisionally entitled Touch and Taste: Embodied Cognition and the Emergence of Aestheticsexamines how various currents of European thought, from antiquity through the twentieth-century (with an emphasis on eighteenth-century aesthetic theories), imagine the senses and how these conceptions of the senses relate to ways cognition is thought to work. A description of the project can be found here. (I am scheduled to teach a graduate course on the five senses at Harvard in Spring '07; see here for a brief course description. I am also co-organizing a workshop on the topic at the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana, planned for May 2007; the Call for Papers can be found here.)
-
In a paper on the place of poetry in the Critique of Judgment, I try to account for Kant's preference for poetry as the highest of arts by linking the abstract voice of humanity with the physiology of silent reading. The paper remains unfinished because I have been unable to overcome several conceptual obstacles. I have found it difficult, for example, to understand the degree to which Kant's notion of aesthetic pleasure relies on an anthropologically motivated idea of the body.
-
A third way of asking the question of the embodiment of thought approaches the issue via the protocols and procedures of literary criticism. How do we establish, accept, or reject evidence for a particular reading? How do we settle on an interpretation of a text when we know that there are other options available (and there always are)? Reading Heinrich von Kleist's novella "The Marquise of O….," I argue that interests emerging from our embodiment urge us towards certain readings before we have had a chance to weigh the evidence. (The article in PDF format is here.)
-
I am also interested in how disgust, one of the most visceral affects known to most of us, relates to aesthetic theory and practice. I have explored this question in two contexts, one a reading of Heinrich von Kleist's play Penthesilea (article in PDF format; German translation: Kleist-Jahrbuch 1998, 127-149), the other an essay on Van Gogh's Ear (article in PDF format). An abridged version of the latter article appeared, in German, in the weekly Die Zeit.
- Literature in the Digital Media
A second area of research relates to media history and media theory. I am particularly interested in how fiction—and our understanding of fiction—might change under pressure from the computer and the internet. I have gone in three directions with this.
-
An article (in German) explores the material basis of the concept of literature through a theoretical exploration of the idea of the archive. The basic question is, what happens to writing when texts (such as this one) can continuously change even after publication? The article was published in the journal Text + Kritik 152: 65-74.
-
Another article (here in PDF format) pursues the question of why computer-based literature (often called hyperfiction) fails to interest readers, myself included. I examine the concept of interactivity and the asymmetry that seems to be required in artistic communication.
-
Rather than merely criticizing failed attempts at connecting fiction and the computer, I am working on an idea for a device that would play literature the way a stereo plays music. This is still a work-in-progress, though the basic idea stands.
Representative Publications
Book
The Laboratory of Poetry: Chemistry and Poetics in the Work of Friedrich Schlegel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002). (Description; order or search the book at Amazon.com.)
German translation: Das Laboratorium der Poesie: Chemie und Poetik bei Friedrich Schlegel, trans. Ingrid Proß-Gill (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2004). (order at Amazon.de.)
Articles and Book Chapters
"Laocoõn and the Hottentots," The German Invention of Race, ed. Sara Eigen & Mark Larrimore (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 23-31.
"Die 'Verwandtschaftstafeln der Buchstaben' und das große Lalula der Romantik: Zur Produktion von Sinn und Unsinn in der Literatur" ["The 'Table of Affinities of Letters' and the Great Lalula of Romanticism: On the Production of Sense and Nonsense in Literature"], "fülle der combination": Literaturforschung und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, ed. Bernhard Dotzler and Sigrid Weigel (Munich: Fink, 2005), 101-125.
"How Interactive Can Fiction Be?" Critical Inquiry 31 (2005): 599-617. (Download as PDF)
"Signatures of Divinity," an essay on the work of Jakob Böhme, The New History of German Literature, ed. David Wellbery et al. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004), 265-270.
"Intimations of Mortality," an essay on Novalis's "Hymnen an die Nacht," The New History of German Literature, ed. David Wellbery et al. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004), 481-485.
"Irresistible Rape: The Lure of Closure in 'The Marquise of O….,'" The Yale Journal of Criticism 17.1 (2004): 51-81. (Download as PDF)
"The Politics of Permanent Parabasis," Studies in Romanticism 42 (2003): 323-340. (Download as PDF)
"Van Gogh's Ear," Modern Art and the Grotesque, ed. Frances Connelly (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 47-62. (Download as PDF)
"Kommunikation und Fiktion: Vom Schreiben und Lesen von Literatur im Internet" [Communication and Fiction: On Writing and Reading Literature in the Internet], Weimarer Beitrãge 49, 1 (2003): 5-16. (Download as PDF)
"Friedrich Schlegels Labor der Poesie" ["Friedrich Schlegel's Laboratory of Chemistry"], Athenãum: Jahrbuch für Romantik 11 (2002): 59-70.
"Was bedeutet: Online lesen? Über die Möglichkeit des Archivs im Cyberspace" [What Does it Mean to Read Online? On the Possibilities of the Archive in Cyberspace], Text + Kritik 152 (2001): 65-74.
"Critical Mass, Fission, Fusion: Friedrich Schlegel's Volatile System," Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Neueren Germanistik 47 (2000): 131-149.
"Die Verschlingung der Metapher. Geschmack und Ekel in der 'Penthesilea,'" Kleist-Jahrbuch 1998, 127-149. Revised translation of "Devouring Metaphor."
"Devouring Metaphor: Disgust and Taste in Kleist's Penthesilea," The German Quarterly 69 (1996): 125-143. (Download as PDF)
"Positions on Heinrich Heine," Rethinking Germanistik: Canon and Culture, ed. Robert Bledsoe et al. (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 183-189.
"Masking and Unmasking: The Ideological Fantasies of the Eighteenth Brumaire," Qui Parle 3 (1989): 53-71.
Commentary and Reviews
Review of David Bindman, From Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002), Goethe Yearbook 2004.
"The Perpetual Conflict in Cultural Studies: An Apology," Profession 2003, 55-65.
"Foreword," issue on German romanticism, Studies in Romanticism 42 (2003): 299.
"Fakultativ vorbildhaft: Soll man für eine Universitätsreform auf US-Modelle schielen?" [On the Reform of German Universities According to US Models], Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 14, 2003. (Article at Sueddeutsche.de)
"Gleichstrom: Das Patt in Florida zeugt von der Stabilität der Demokratie" [The Draw in the Florida Elections Testifies to the Stability of Democracy], Süddeutsche Zeitung, Nov. 28, 2000.
"Ekel. Oder wie sich van Goghs Ohr entfaltet. Untersuchungen eines peinlich körperlichen Begriff [Disgust, or how Van Gogh's Ear Unfolds: Investigating a Painfully Physical Idea], Die Zeit 29 (1999): 45. (Article at Zeit.de)
"A Vast Unravelling. What Do Literary Studies Teach?" Commentary, Times Literary Supplement 5004 (1999): 14-15.
Review of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Political Crumbs, trans. Martin Chalmers (London: Verso, 1990), Qui Parle 5 (1991): 125-131
|
