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Recent devaluations of a liberal arts education call the formative
concept of Bildung, a defining model of self-cultivation rooted in
18th and 19th century German philosophy and culture, into question
and force us to reconsider what it once meant and now means to be
an "educated" individual. This volume uses an arc of
interdisciplinary scholarship to map both the epistemological
origins and cultural expressions of the pivotal notion of Bildung
at the heart of pursuit in the humanities. From its intriguing
original historical manifestations to its continuing resonance in
current ongoing debates surrounding the humanities, the editors
urge us to ask and discover how the classical concept of Bildung,
so central to humanistic inquiry, was historically imagined and
applied in its original German context.
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: Sean 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 Mucke, 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.
"Primitive Renaissance" argues that the radicality of
early-twentieth-century movements such as expressionism was not
their modernism but rather their primitivism. At the heart of the
work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Carl
Einstein, and others was a critique of modernity through a
primitivist aesthetic that privileged art over science and reason.
Although drawing on non-European cultural traditions, the new
aesthetic was not merely exoticism, an artistic phase or fad that
opened a window on the cultural other. It was conceived less as a
simple negation of the trappings of civilization than as a more
pervasive and structured critique of how life is organized in the
modern world. Based on a traditionalist rather than Enlightenment
view of the function of art in society, primitivism contended that
art provides the core mythic structure for human consciousness. On
a broader level, by negating modernity, primitivism also challenged
its inevitability. Modernity became one of a number of equally
plausible cultural strategies for organizing life in the
contemporary world. Ranging insightfully across the visual arts,
literature, and philosophy, "Primitive Renaissance" offers a
provocative reassessment of the significance of primitivism and its
contribution to the intellectual, artistic, and cultural climate of
Europe in the early twentieth century.
A landmark book, David Pan's Sacrifice in the Modern World seeks
to explain the continuing emphasis, in modern times, on sacrifice.
Pan specifically turns to the culture of sacrifice--ritualized and
sanctified death--in Nazi Germany, showing how that regime co-opted
an existing discussion of sacrifice and infused it with its own
mythology. Pan suggests that sacrifice is a key value in every
society but that there is a preponderance of association of
sacrifice with Nazi culture and therefore a largely pejorative
treatment of sacrifice.
Surveying the arguments of philosopher Alfred Baeumler and other
symptomatic Nazi texts, Pan shows how the Nazis' reactionary
intellec-tual culture unraveled much of the Enlightenment project.
In so doing, he is able to offer a compelling new perspective on
basic theoretical concepts in the work of Kant, Nietzsche, Adorno,
Bataille, Girard, and others. He posits that it is only by clearing
our way through the Nazis' misuse of sacrifice that we can
understand the durability of sacrifi-cial structures
that--following several of the theorists he discusses-- establish
the fundamental values by which we live our lives.
Rather than condemning the Nazi appeal to sacrifice itself, this
book looks at the particular ways in which sacrifice was
distributed and structured within that society. All cultures must
grapple with the existential violence of the human condition, and
they frequently do so through aesthetic treatments of sacrifice,
rooted in myths and tradi-tions. Pan argues that our task is not to
eradicate these traditions but to engage them by carefully
evaluating the commitments and values that they imply.
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