Berlin's Forgotten Future: City, History, and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Germany

Through an analysis of the works of the Berlin Aufklärer Friedrich Gedike, Friedrich Nicolai, G. E. Lessing, and Moses Mendelssohn, Matt Erlin shows how the rapid changes occurring in Prussia's newly minted metropolis challenged these intellectuals to engage in precisely the kind of nuanced thinking about history that has come to be seen as characteristic of the German Enlightenment. The author's demonstration of Berlin's historical-theoretical significance also provides perspective on the larger question of the city's impact on eighteenth-century German culture. Challenging the widespread idea that German intellectuals were anti-urban, the study reveals the extent to which urban sociability came to be seen by some as a problematic but crucial factor in the realization of their Enlightenment aims

Topic Modeling, Epistemology, and the English and German Novel

According to Rita Felski, context is overrated. Even in the sophisticated variants of contextualization typical of the New Historicism, she explains, scholars' obsession with historical context as the ultimate source of textual meaning disregards the capacity of literature to resonate across time and space. "Why is it," she writes, "that we can feel solicited, button-holed, stirred up, by words that were drafted eons ago?" (576). Felski is not the first to raise such objections. In an essay from 2001, Russell Berman takes a similar approach to the politics of periodization, pointing out how periodizing a work can serve to discipline it, that is to say, to deny its claim on the reader's present. For Berman, "A literary-critical culture that values historical frames over 'artistic pleasure,' . . . tends to dismiss the diachronic moment in any reading, and with it the potential of tradition, the capacity precisely to transcend the constraints of the isolated historical moment." Both Felski and Berman present powerful arguments against the fetishization of contemporaneity as the source of the truth of a work. In their focus on affect, however, they neglect a crucial facet of the transtemporal resonance they seek to underscore. To limit oneself to the question of how and why literature can "solicit," "button-hole," and "stir us up" is to understate its role as both an instrument of cognition and a means of fostering particular cognitive capacities, or at least to sidestep the constitutive role of cognition in the experience of aesthetic pleasure

Necessary Luxuries: Books, Literature, and the Culture of Consumption in Germany, 1770–1817

The consumer revolution of the eighteenth century brought new and exotic commodities to Europe from abroad—coffee, tea, spices, and new textiles to name a few. Yet one of the most widely distributed luxury commodities in the period was not new at all, and was produced locally—the book. In Necessary Luxuries Matt Erlin considers books and the culture around books during this period, focusing specifically on Germany where literature, and the fine arts in general, were the subject of soul-searching debates over the legitimacy of luxury in the modern world. Building on recent work done in the fields of consumption studies as well as the New Economic Criticism, Erlin combines intellectual-historical chapters (on luxury as a concept, luxury editions, and concerns about addictive reading) with contextualized close readings of novels by Campe, Wieland, Moritz, Novalis, and Goethe. As he demonstrates, artists in this period were deeply concerned with their status as luxury producers. The rhetorical strategies they developed to justify their activities evolved in dialogue with more general discussions regarding new forms of discretionary consumption. By emphasizing the fragile legitimacy of the fine arts in the period, Necessary Luxuries offers a fresh perspective on the broader trajectory of German literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, one that allows us to view the entire period in terms of a dynamic unity, rather than simply as a series of literary trends and countertrends

Berlin's Forgotten Future

Through an analysis of the works of the Berlin Aufklärer Friedrich Gedike, Friedrich Nicolai, G. E. Lessing, and Moses Mendelssohn, Matt Erlin shows how the rapid changes occurring in Prussia's newly minted metropolis challenged these intellectuals to engage in precisely the kind of nuanced thinking about history that has come to be seen as characteristic of the German Enlightenment. The author's demonstration of Berlin's historical-theoretical significance also provides perspective on the larger question of the city's impact on eighteenth-century German culture. Challenging the widespread idea that German intellectuals were anti-urban, the study reveals the extent to which urban sociability came to be seen by some as a problematic but crucial factor in the realization of their Enlightenment aims

Topic Modeling, Epistemology, and the English and German Novel

Novel text files, spreadsheets, stopword lists, and Python notebooks to accompany essa

Berlin's Forgotten Future

Through an analysis of the works of the Berlin Aufklärer Friedrich Gedike, Friedrich Nicolai, G. E. Lessing, and Moses Mendelssohn, Matt Erlin shows how the rapid changes occurring in Prussia's newly minted metropolis challenged these intellectuals to engage in precisely the kind of nuanced thinking about history that has come to be seen as characteristic of the German Enlightenment. The author's demonstration of Berlin's historical-theoretical significance also provides perspective on the larger question of the city's impact on eighteenth-century German culture. Challenging the widespread idea that German intellectuals were anti-urban, the study reveals the extent to which urban sociability came to be seen by some as a problematic but crucial factor in the realization of their Enlightenment aims

The scholar, the library, and the digital future [videorecording]

After a brief introduction from Noah Heringman, each participant in the panel describes some of the uses of digital archives in their scholarly research of the humanities. A brief question and answer period with the audience follows the presentations

Crossing Over: Gendered Reading Formations at the Muncie Public Library, 1891-1902

Readers are never merely passive recipients of textual messages. One of the most powerful insights of reader-response theory in the 1970s and 1980s is that the meaning of a text never resides entirely within the artifact itself. Commentators from Carlo Ginzberg ("aggressive originality"), to Jauss ("horizon of expectations"), to Fish ("interpretive communities"), and Radway ("Reading is not Eating") have long-since established that readers are creators of meaning. To quote Tony Bennett, meaning "is not a thing that texts can have, but is something that can only be produced, and always differently, within the reading formations that regulate the encounters between texts and readers." Yet even as it challenges the very idea that texts exist independently of readers and their institutional and social contexts, Bennett's concept of a "reading formation" also reminds us that there are socio-historically determined limits to creative appropriation. For Bennett, text, context, and reader constitute an inseparable unity; every reading situation is shaped by "discursive and intertextual determinations that organize and animate the practice of reading. . . ." A rich and nuanced account of the complex balance between social determination and autonomy therefore requires a combination of methods, both a consideration of textual features and investigation of book-historical, ideological, institutional, and social pressures