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DAAD Interdisciplinary Summer Seminar in German Studies for Faculty and Recent Ph.D’s:
Narratives of Modernity: From Lessing to Luhmann
University of Chicago
June 15 – July 24, 2009
Director: David E. Wellbery
Readings
This seminar will explore the narrative construction of modernity from the Enlightenment to the recent present. Discussions will be located at a discursive juncture where methodological reflections on narratology in a generalized sense intersect with theories and philosophies of history. Analytical and interpretive issues that come to the fore at this juncture have ramifications throughout the humanities and social sciences.
The field of narratology that developed out of formalism and structuralism fashioned its analytical instruments primarily with reference to mythic, folkloristic, and literary texts. Its agenda was set by a categorical distinction between imaginary worlds and socio-cultural reality. Notwithstanding its considerable insights, narrative theory was thus curtailed by a disciplinary division of labor that restricted it to the domain of closed and merely possible worlds. Recently, however, there has been a call for an expanded or generalized narratology: for a systematic inquiry into the narrative organization of our social and cultural reality. In fact, the entire spectrum of social experience, from ephemeral interactions to elaborate organizational protocols, is imbued with narrative structures. Narrative is co-emergent with reality. It is a highly plastic form that establishes patterns of continuity and discontinuity while holding options open and tolerating ambiguities. Its power as an instrument for the rendering of socio-cultural worlds resides in its flexibility: its temporal openness, its plurality of perspectives, and its transformability. Precisely these features make narrative a particularly complex and rich object of study.
The capacity of narrative to provide frameworks of self-understanding is especially salient in the case of large-scale collective processes that, although unavailable to perceptual inspection, nevertheless must be “observed” if society is to achieve an account of itself (Niklas Luhmann, Beobachtungen der Moderne, 1992). Since the last third of the eighteenth century, the concept of “history” has formed such an instrument of self-interpretation. One of the most contested areas within this interpretation has been the construal of “modernity.” This is the zone of inquiry the 2009 Interdisciplinary Summer Seminar will endeavor to chart. For it is certainly the case that the notion of the “modern” concerns a host of disciplines, from history and philosophy to literary- and art-historical studies. It stands to debate in social and political theory, but also in fields such as architecture and music. And across all these disciplinary terrains it has received diverse, indeed contradictory investments. Devoted to exploring various Narratives of Modernity, this seminar is designed to accommodate the entire range of disciplinary interests bearing on the concept of modernity. Organized around a set of exemplary texts, the Seminar will combine focused analysis with topical excursions based on participants’ individual research interests. The theoretical framework provided by our generalized narratology guarantees continuity across the chronological range spanned by the readings, but at the same time is sufficiently supple to allow for multiple avenues of investigation.
The Seminar will entail five sections:
I) Our investigation of the narrative constitution of modernity begins with a cluster of texts exhibiting the Enlightenment concept of history at its most boldly speculative: the “Ringparabel” at the center of Lessing’s Nathan der Weise and the same author’s Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts as well as Kant’s Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?, his Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht, and his Mutmasslicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte. Due to the relative dearth of empirical material (historical fact) that characterizes all these texts, the element of narrative construction comes particularly forcefully to the fore, and, indeed, both authors are highly aware of the inventive aspect of their narrative activity and the ambiguities of their position as narrators. Perhaps not until the twentieth century will such self-consciously audacious constructivism find expression in historico-philosophical discourse.
II) Section II examines a cluster of texts rooted more or less firmly in German classicism: Schiller’s Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung, Hölderlin’s famous letters to Böhlendorff, and excerpts from Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. What characterizes these texts (and, of course, others could easily be adduced here) in comparison with those discussed in Section I is a considerable complication of the question of historical perspective. Because they conceive the “modern” as a qualitatively distinct mode of consciousness, the problem of relating it to its antecedent forms becomes extremely difficult. And, in fact, Schiller’s and Hölderlin’s ruminations in particular can be understood as deriving their peculiar contortions from this dilemma. Hegel, on the other hand, resolves the issue by inventing a narrative technique that renders self-negation and self-transformation as the very mode of historical continuity. Additionally, this cluster represents the first appearance of what might be termed historical nostalgia, an elegiac sense of irreparable loss that will become a recurring motif in later constructions of modernity. Finally, the modern is conceived by Schiller and Hölderlin not in exclusively religious or political terms, as with Lessing and Kant, but in terms of aesthetic norms (modes of representation, participation). And this theme will continue to occupy us throughout our discussions.
III. The texts attended to in the third section cut a swath across, roughly, the middle third of the nineteenth century: from Heine and Marx to Nietzsche via Baudelaire, Wagner, and Helmholtz. During this phase, the concept of modernity undergoes a significant transformation. It is no longer conceived as a quality of mind or a mode of relating to the world, but as a specific experience. Moreover, this experience is understood to a much greater extent than previously to be rooted in and conditioned by material conditions: urban life, scientific advances, technologies. A further interesting feature of these texts is the effort to preserve the normative content of the notion of modernity despite their generally anti-idealist premises. Finally, we find here a fairly broad spectrum of value investments, from utopian affirmation to outright condemnation. As in the other sections of the seminar, the textual cluster will serve as a focal point from which forays into historically related thematic areas (e.g., the art and literature of realism, the reorganization of historical time) are undertaken.
IV. Our fourth textual cluster involves a kind of experiment: the attempt to capture some of the tensions of the variegated discourse of modernism by focusing on the juxtaposition between Benjamin’s ambivalent avant-gardism, on the one hand, and the anti-modernist thought of Schmitt and Strauss, on the other. For this too is an aspect of the narrative construction of modernity: that it produces rejections of the very movement in which it participates. As if in a magnifying glass, the Schmitt-Strauss debate will allow us to investigate this dimension of the concept of modernity while providing linkages to kindred developments (e.g., the notion of a “conservative revolution”). At the same time, Benjamin’s work will enable us to explore the degree to which his theologically imbued Marxism is related, if only by opposition, to reactionary modernism as exemplified especially by Schmitt. A major task of our discussions in this section will be to contextualize the “confrontation” embodied in the selected texts.
V. The “finale” of the seminar will draw on Niklas Luhmann’s Beobachtungen der Moderne (1992) as a vehicle for reevaluating the entire course of our discussions throughout the previous four sections. For what Luhmann’s analysis makes clear is that modernity is an artifact of its observation. Call this the “reflective structure” of modernity. The thought is that to be “modern” is to hold to a self-description as modern; it is a way of narrating one’s own historical moment. This is, of course, a “circular” definition, but just that feature may be what makes it a compelling definition as well. With the help of Luhmann, then, the Seminar will conclude with a sort of meta-level account of its own itinerary. Presumably, our narratological take on modernity will find here its theoretical justification.
In addition to the sessions devoted to readings, the seminar will enlist the participation of scholars from the University of Chicago community whose work is relevant to our general topic. Thus far, the following lectures have been tentatively planned:
Robert Pippin
Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor, Committee on Social Thought and Department of Philosophy
"Modernism as a Philosophical Concept"
David J. Levin
Associate Professor of Germanic Studies, Committee on Cinema and Media Studies, Theater and Performance Studies
"Modernity and the Performance Paradigm"
Eric Santner
Philip and Ida Romberg Professor in Modern Germanic Studies
"Messianism and Modernism"
Ralph Ubl
Jean and Alan Frumkin Professor of Visual Arts, Committee on Social Thought
"Max Ernst’s Historical Vision"
The Seminar will also take advantage of resources for the study of modernism in Chicago. In particular, a joint tour of the Art Institute, which boasts one of the finest collections of modernist art in the United States, will be undertaken. An architectural tour entitled: Between Berlin and Chicago: Mies van der Rohe is also being organized.
For applications, please visit http://www.daad.org/?p=48512
Further Information: wellbery@uchicago.edu
David E. Wellbery is the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffebaugh Carlson University Professor at the University of Chicago, where he serves in the Department of Germanic Studies, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the Committee on Social Thought. He has been a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1989-90) and the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung (2002-3). In 2005, he was awarded the Research Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung; in 2008, he was elected a corresponding member of the Bayrische Akademie der Wissenschaften. His publications include: Lessing’s Laocoon: Aesthetics and Semiotics in the Age of Reason (1984); The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (1996); Seiltänzer des Paradoxalen. Aufsätze zur ästhetischen Wissenschaft (2007). He is editor-in-chief of A New History of German Literature (2005) and since 1998 he has been co-editor of Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte.