This essay underscores the importance of seeking refuge in literary aesthetics by arguing that Go... more This essay underscores the importance of seeking refuge in literary aesthetics by arguing that Goethe's concept of world literature was formulated in compensation for the shock of military defeat, political collapse, and foreign occupation. The refugee became a figure of identification in Goethe's writing in the 1790s and his Orientalist Nachdichtungen. The Goethean mode of reading distant literatures entails identifying with other writers who are often already marginalized within their own cultures. This manner of engaging with non-European texts refuses to establish a pantheon of great works precisely because it relies on a writerly interest in rediscovering one's own identity by reading foreign literature from a position of insecurity and weakness. The goal of reading is always the reconstruction of the self through a strange text. With its eagerness to establish a monumental cultural figure, the nineteenth and early twentieth-century canon marginalized precisely those unGerman texts in which Goethe most effectively dismantled his own authorial status. Only with the demise of colonial empires and the defeat of Nazi Germany did a more modest, anti-hegemonic mode of reading remerge.
Page 1. \ Reader an Introduction In Daniel Leonhard Purdi Page 2. Page 3. Page 4. Page 5. The Ris... more Page 1. \ Reader an Introduction In Daniel Leonhard Purdi Page 2. Page 3. Page 4. Page 5. The Rise of Fashion This On< SPXS-AYN-J2AB Page 6. Page 7. The Rise of Fashion A Reader Edited and with an Introduction by Daniel ...
Gedruckt erschienen im Universitätsverlag der TU Berlin, ISBN 978-3-7983-2914-0Was ist gute Lands... more Gedruckt erschienen im Universitätsverlag der TU Berlin, ISBN 978-3-7983-2914-0Was ist gute Landschaftsarchitektur? – Undine Giseke, Norbert Kühn, Cordula Loidl-Reisch und Jürgen Weidinger antworten in Auseinandersetzung mit den Konzepten Urbaner Metabolismus, Designing Urban Nature, Alltagstauglichkeit und Atmosphäre. Mit den Konzepten soll etwas verstanden und sollen zugleich Impulse für das Entwerfen gegeben werden. Das kennzeichnet eine besondere Form der Reflexion, die hier als landschaftsarchitektonisches Denken bezeichnet wird.What is good landscape architecture? — Undine Giseke, Norbert Kühn, Cordula Loidl-Reisch, and Jürgen Weidinger provide answers to this question, examining the concepts of urban metabolism, designing urban nature, suitability for daily use, and atmosphere. Their articles seek to bring clarity and provide inspiration for design work. This characterizes a special form of reflection that is referred to here as landscape-architectural thinking
This paper argues broadly that China was an important concern at early modern German courts becau... more This paper argues broadly that China was an important concern at early modern German courts because East Asia constituted a region into which German electors hoped to expand their own political power. Their ventures were only sometimes successful, leading thus to a cycle of political engagement with and detachment from East Asia. Within the publishing world, information about China was constrained by the limited access Europeans had to the Middle Kingdom. Even though Jesuit missionaries provided the most scholarly accounts of the Chinese elite, their reports and translations did not satisfy the growing demand for writing about China; thus early modern publishers repeated many of the same narratives and descriptions of China in ever-new reformulations of familiar texts. This article examines the on-again, off-again media cycle of early modern representations of China. (DP)
Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature & Culture, 1997
Hermeneutic understanding purports to penetrate a spiritual depth imbedded within texts. Historic... more Hermeneutic understanding purports to penetrate a spiritual depth imbedded within texts. Historically when a subject's engagement with a text has not attained hermeneutic insight that encounter has been characterized as a mere performance, an unsuccessful attempt to empathize ...
Berlin and Beijing, at first glance you could joke that they both have walls in common, each thei... more Berlin and Beijing, at first glance you could joke that they both have walls in common, each their own historic defensive barrier that ultimately failed to stop the invasion from abroad, but what really has united them is that over the past 20 years both have undergone radical transformations brought on by the end of communism. The two cities can be compared as having two distinct architectural responses to the new urban spaces created by this nonviolent transformation. Ackbar Abbas hints at the spatial possibilities in both cities when he compares the disorientation created by the Chinese building boom with Gilles Deleuze’s description of the flat, bombed out spaces of postwar Europe.1 The broad empty lots that dotted German, French, Dutch, and Italian cities have also appeared in China, though there the open expanses were created without war. If we look at images of Chinese cities under construction, the similarities with Berlin Mitte after the Wall become quite striking. Sze tsung Leong’s recent photographs of Shanghai reveal the emptiness akin to Potsdamer Platz before reconstruction.2 We could readily argue that post-Wall Berlin’s empty spaces, the unbuilt zone of the Todesstreifen, also presented city dwellers with a dizzying array of possibilities, wide-open voids that quickly elicited a multitude of architectural recommendations on how to fill in the emptiness.3
... 50 The Cosmopolitan Geography of Adolf Loos ... By reading the national tensions and strategi... more ... 50 The Cosmopolitan Geography of Adolf Loos ... By reading the national tensions and strategies for their resolution back into Loosʼs writ-ings, we may ... de Gruyter, 2000), 52741; for a comprehensive history see Robert Kann, The Multinational Empire: Nationalism and National ...
and similitudes that future poets might emulate,” by the late twentieth century, Arab poets, acco... more and similitudes that future poets might emulate,” by the late twentieth century, Arab poets, according to Hassan, have increasingly thrown off the yoke of meter, favoring, for instance, prose poems, and thereby eroding the vibrancy of literary models that once characterized Eastern cultures. Bidney’s mammoth translation project includes a 200-page section of his own rhymed commentary on each of the twelve books of Goethe’s Divan, which indicates that English-language poets continue to experiment with foreign poetic forms in an aspirational manner. To the extent that such poetry enriches the resources of English as a poetic medium, the result may be reserved for cognoscenti. This is where Goethe’s use of the term epochs in connection with literary translation is apt. As Weidner writes, Goethe assumed that “languages and literatures follow a ‘natural’ course of development which is reflected . . . ultimately in a continuous assimilation of the various national literatures into each ot...
This essay underscores the importance of seeking refuge in literary aesthetics by arguing that Go... more This essay underscores the importance of seeking refuge in literary aesthetics by arguing that Goethe's concept of world literature was formulated in compensation for the shock of military defeat, political collapse, and foreign occupation. The refugee became a figure of identification in Goethe's writing in the 1790s and his Orientalist Nachdichtungen. The Goethean mode of reading distant literatures entails identifying with other writers who are often already marginalized within their own cultures. This manner of engaging with non-European texts refuses to establish a pantheon of great works precisely because it relies on a writerly interest in rediscovering one's own identity by reading foreign literature from a position of insecurity and weakness. The goal of reading is always the reconstruction of the self through a strange text. With its eagerness to establish a monumental cultural figure, the nineteenth and early twentieth-century canon marginalized precisely those unGerman texts in which Goethe most effectively dismantled his own authorial status. Only with the demise of colonial empires and the defeat of Nazi Germany did a more modest, anti-hegemonic mode of reading remerge.
Page 1. \ Reader an Introduction In Daniel Leonhard Purdi Page 2. Page 3. Page 4. Page 5. The Ris... more Page 1. \ Reader an Introduction In Daniel Leonhard Purdi Page 2. Page 3. Page 4. Page 5. The Rise of Fashion This On< SPXS-AYN-J2AB Page 6. Page 7. The Rise of Fashion A Reader Edited and with an Introduction by Daniel ...
Gedruckt erschienen im Universitätsverlag der TU Berlin, ISBN 978-3-7983-2914-0Was ist gute Lands... more Gedruckt erschienen im Universitätsverlag der TU Berlin, ISBN 978-3-7983-2914-0Was ist gute Landschaftsarchitektur? – Undine Giseke, Norbert Kühn, Cordula Loidl-Reisch und Jürgen Weidinger antworten in Auseinandersetzung mit den Konzepten Urbaner Metabolismus, Designing Urban Nature, Alltagstauglichkeit und Atmosphäre. Mit den Konzepten soll etwas verstanden und sollen zugleich Impulse für das Entwerfen gegeben werden. Das kennzeichnet eine besondere Form der Reflexion, die hier als landschaftsarchitektonisches Denken bezeichnet wird.What is good landscape architecture? — Undine Giseke, Norbert Kühn, Cordula Loidl-Reisch, and Jürgen Weidinger provide answers to this question, examining the concepts of urban metabolism, designing urban nature, suitability for daily use, and atmosphere. Their articles seek to bring clarity and provide inspiration for design work. This characterizes a special form of reflection that is referred to here as landscape-architectural thinking
This paper argues broadly that China was an important concern at early modern German courts becau... more This paper argues broadly that China was an important concern at early modern German courts because East Asia constituted a region into which German electors hoped to expand their own political power. Their ventures were only sometimes successful, leading thus to a cycle of political engagement with and detachment from East Asia. Within the publishing world, information about China was constrained by the limited access Europeans had to the Middle Kingdom. Even though Jesuit missionaries provided the most scholarly accounts of the Chinese elite, their reports and translations did not satisfy the growing demand for writing about China; thus early modern publishers repeated many of the same narratives and descriptions of China in ever-new reformulations of familiar texts. This article examines the on-again, off-again media cycle of early modern representations of China. (DP)
Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature & Culture, 1997
Hermeneutic understanding purports to penetrate a spiritual depth imbedded within texts. Historic... more Hermeneutic understanding purports to penetrate a spiritual depth imbedded within texts. Historically when a subject's engagement with a text has not attained hermeneutic insight that encounter has been characterized as a mere performance, an unsuccessful attempt to empathize ...
Berlin and Beijing, at first glance you could joke that they both have walls in common, each thei... more Berlin and Beijing, at first glance you could joke that they both have walls in common, each their own historic defensive barrier that ultimately failed to stop the invasion from abroad, but what really has united them is that over the past 20 years both have undergone radical transformations brought on by the end of communism. The two cities can be compared as having two distinct architectural responses to the new urban spaces created by this nonviolent transformation. Ackbar Abbas hints at the spatial possibilities in both cities when he compares the disorientation created by the Chinese building boom with Gilles Deleuze’s description of the flat, bombed out spaces of postwar Europe.1 The broad empty lots that dotted German, French, Dutch, and Italian cities have also appeared in China, though there the open expanses were created without war. If we look at images of Chinese cities under construction, the similarities with Berlin Mitte after the Wall become quite striking. Sze tsung Leong’s recent photographs of Shanghai reveal the emptiness akin to Potsdamer Platz before reconstruction.2 We could readily argue that post-Wall Berlin’s empty spaces, the unbuilt zone of the Todesstreifen, also presented city dwellers with a dizzying array of possibilities, wide-open voids that quickly elicited a multitude of architectural recommendations on how to fill in the emptiness.3
... 50 The Cosmopolitan Geography of Adolf Loos ... By reading the national tensions and strategi... more ... 50 The Cosmopolitan Geography of Adolf Loos ... By reading the national tensions and strategies for their resolution back into Loosʼs writ-ings, we may ... de Gruyter, 2000), 52741; for a comprehensive history see Robert Kann, The Multinational Empire: Nationalism and National ...
and similitudes that future poets might emulate,” by the late twentieth century, Arab poets, acco... more and similitudes that future poets might emulate,” by the late twentieth century, Arab poets, according to Hassan, have increasingly thrown off the yoke of meter, favoring, for instance, prose poems, and thereby eroding the vibrancy of literary models that once characterized Eastern cultures. Bidney’s mammoth translation project includes a 200-page section of his own rhymed commentary on each of the twelve books of Goethe’s Divan, which indicates that English-language poets continue to experiment with foreign poetic forms in an aspirational manner. To the extent that such poetry enriches the resources of English as a poetic medium, the result may be reserved for cognoscenti. This is where Goethe’s use of the term epochs in connection with literary translation is apt. As Weidner writes, Goethe assumed that “languages and literatures follow a ‘natural’ course of development which is reflected . . . ultimately in a continuous assimilation of the various national literatures into each ot...
, among others. Students will learn how these modern theories relate to the German Idealist tradi... more , among others. Students will learn how these modern theories relate to the German Idealist tradition, particularly Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, as well as the history of German Marxism. Topics include the psychology of the metropolitan individual, the commodification of culture, money, and interpersonal relationships, the architecture of shopping, visual advertising through posters and photography, and cinema as a means of understanding social relations, as well as the role of visual media in public debate. The course will consider how modernist architecture, particularly from the Bauhaus school, redefined urban spaces and introduced new functionalist designs. The course will examine how Frankfurt School thinkers responded to the provocative design proposals presented by modernist architects. Students will examine specific modernist designs for consumer products to examine the relationship between the appearance of a commodity and its use, in order to understand how appearance and function are interdependent within modernism. In broad terms, class discussions will focus on such questions as: How does the relationship between the visual image and society change under industrial capitalism? What political functions do visual images have in consumer culture? What visual mechanisms does the "culture industry" deploy to organize public consciousness? What critical responses are available to visual artists within a mass-market economy? The course will provide students an historical understanding of early twentieth-century German consumer culture and its visual representation, while also offering them critical intellectual tools to understand the social and economic implications of visual images within consumer culture. The course will be taught in English with readings in both languages. Everyone will be asked to give one class presentation on a reading from the syllabus and to write a final 15-page research paper.
Chinese Sympathies: Media, Missionaries, and World Literature from Marco Polo to Goethe, 2021
Chinese Sympathies examines how Europeans first came to identify with Chinese figures to such an ... more Chinese Sympathies examines how Europeans first came to identify with Chinese figures to such an extent that they could readily discover similarities between themselves and East Asians. The global restructuring of early media practices through imperial trade networks allowed missionary letters, theological treatises, imperial histories, tragic dramas, moral philosophies, literary translations and poetic cycles to portray correspondences between China and Europe. This succession of intellectual regimes, each professing to have no immediate alliance with each other—Jesuit missionaries, Baroque encyclopedists, Enlightenment moralists, world literature translators—managed to refine textually mediated emotions to such an extent that they all could assert that the Chinese were fundamentally no different than their fellows. Early modern European sympathies for Chinese culture existed in a double sense of the word—as emotional responses to another person’s condition (real or imaginary), and as unseen influences exerted between two bodies over a great distance. Both forms of sympathy depend upon complex, long-distance communications networks.
Measuring through comparison and contrast is and has always been a way of relating to the world. ... more Measuring through comparison and contrast is and has always been a way of relating to the world. As the historian Sebastian Conrad succinctly observes in What is Global History? (2016), modalities of world histories developed in the nineteenth century “were a result of global hierarchies and asymmetrical geopolitical structures” (28). A model of teleological progression of world history that originates in Europe and manifests itself later through adaption in non-European societies can hardly capture our current world order, which is marked by decolonization, migration, and globalization. The seismic shifts of financial and political powers from old centers of the West to new and rising global powers such as China and India cannot sustain a derivative idea of progress and development. Conrad proposes a “relational” model of global history, which underlines that “a historical unit—a civilization, a nation, a family—does not develop in isolation” (65). The essays published in this special issue of Monatshefte augment this relational model. Instead of examining the German cultural space in isolation, these essays study “Germany” in relation to other geopolitical units. The authors engage with different incarnations of the tensions between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, as well as between universalism and particularism, both retrospectively and prospectively. Through a relational— rather than an essentialist—comparison, the essays in this collection open up multiple, mutually entangled lines of inquiry. These essays were first presented at the 47th Wisconsin Workshop, “Measuring the ‘World’: Formation, Transformation and Transmission of the ‘National’ and the ‘Universal’ from the Eighteenth Century to the Present” at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The purpose of the workshop was to conduct an interdisciplinary inquiry of concepts, structures, and terms used widely in literature, music, visual and performing arts, history, political science, geography, and sociology, and to locate stations of their growth and development, first within and then beyond Germany. The concepts, structures, and movements the workshop examined were all products of specific historical and cultural moments in German history, when a cosmopolitan orientation to the world was emerging parallel to a focused investment in a cultural organization around the German language, arts, and dissemination of knowledge. The papers, some of which are included here, explored Germany’s role as scientific and artistic power-broker and scrutinized the political, cultural, and moral dimensions of the numerous ways the world can be measured, giving rise to the following questions: How was Germany’s conceptualization of the world politically charged and historically conditioned? How and why did Germany become a forerunner in the ways of conceptualizing the world? What are the positive and negative legacies of the modes of situating the Self and the Other in German intellectual history? How do historical contingencies and political realities impact the origins and proliferation of conceptual terms and frameworks in transnational contexts?
Uploads
Papers by Daniel Purdy
Early modern European sympathies for Chinese culture existed in a double sense of the word—as emotional responses to another person’s condition (real or imaginary), and as unseen influences exerted between two bodies over a great distance. Both forms of sympathy depend upon complex, long-distance communications networks.
shifts of financial and political powers from old centers of the West to new and rising global powers such as China and India cannot sustain a derivative idea of progress and development. Conrad proposes a “relational” model of global history, which underlines that “a historical unit—a civilization, a nation, a family—does not develop in isolation” (65).
The essays published in this special issue of Monatshefte
augment this relational model. Instead of examining the German cultural
space in isolation, these essays study “Germany” in relation to other geopolitical units. The authors engage with different incarnations of the tensions between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, as well as between universalism and particularism, both retrospectively and prospectively. Through a relational— rather than an essentialist—comparison, the essays in this collection open up multiple, mutually entangled lines of inquiry. These essays were first presented at the 47th Wisconsin Workshop, “Measuring the ‘World’: Formation, Transformation and Transmission of the ‘National’ and the ‘Universal’ from the Eighteenth Century to the Present” at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The purpose of the workshop was to conduct an interdisciplinary inquiry of concepts, structures, and terms used widely in literature, music, visual and performing arts, history, political science, geography, and sociology, and to locate stations of their growth and development, first within and then beyond Germany. The concepts, structures, and movements the workshop examined were all products of specific historical
and cultural moments in German history, when a cosmopolitan orientation to the world was emerging parallel to a focused investment in a cultural organization around the German language, arts, and dissemination of knowledge. The papers, some of which are included here, explored Germany’s role as scientific and artistic power-broker and scrutinized the political, cultural, and moral dimensions of the numerous ways the world can be measured, giving rise to the following questions: How was Germany’s conceptualization of the world politically charged and historically conditioned? How and why did Germany become a forerunner in the ways of conceptualizing the world? What are the positive and negative legacies of the modes of situating the Self and the Other in German intellectual history? How do historical contingencies and political realities impact the origins and proliferation
of conceptual terms and frameworks in transnational contexts?