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.

Animals have been subjects and objects of an ageless discourse in Western culture, which seeks through reincarnations, metamorphoses and philosophical vision to define the human and the animal and the nature of the border that separates the two. At a moment in history when the human being is about to be replaced by the machine, there is a blurring of the old line separating humans from animals. There is a desire to look for human uniqueness in the animal body, not the rational mind; a desire to re-examine the historical record in search of a lost tradition of zoomorphic shamans, trainers, poets and philosophers. This text records the history of that fluctuating boundary between animals and humans as expressed in literary, philosophical and scientific texts, but also in the visual arts and historical practices such as dissections, the hunt, zoo construction, and circus acts.

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Frequenting circuses in Paris and Berlin, Frank Wedekind, best known for Spring Awakening and the Lulu plays, learned that trapeze artists and tightrope walkers rely on different artificial reference points in space, in order to maintain their balance and orient themselves and to create their own sensorial and phenomenal worlds. This lesson in radical perspectivism and constructivism is a key to Wedekind's practice as a playwright, and it links the Munich dramatist's work to the thought of Schopenhauer, who first used the term Elastizitat in a philosophical sense; Darwin, who considered adaptability to be a primordial characteristic of life; Nietzsche, whose commentary on acrobats in Also sprach Zarathustra announces the Overman; and Freud, who used the term to describe the reactive, conservative nature of the instincts. Taking Elastizitat and the modern notion of adaptability as its point of departure, this book explores Wedekind's construction of space, movement and character in his plays, pantomimes, ballets and theoretical writings as a means of understanding both the structural consistencies and the ideological incongruities that permeate his fiction and nearly all layers of his works. This work also disengages Wedekind from traditional discussions of the dramatist as controversial social critic and reintroduces him into more productive discussions of his connection to nineteenth-century philosophical debates surrounding determinism, dualism and perception, on the one hand, and modern notions of risk, danger and precarity on the other.