Events Calendar

Craig Young Scholars Lecture
Wednesday, March 23, 2016, 12:00pm - 01:30pm
This repeat is an exception to the normal repeat pattern

The German Department is excited to announce this new lecture series, generously sponsored by Charlotte M. and Bob Craig, to host young scholars of German to present talks on their current research.

Attraction, Individuation, and Indifference in Goethe and Schelling

Schelling's Naturphilosophie construes nature as a system characterized by localized physical-semiotic operations: movement, resistance, attraction, repulsion, expansion, contraction, binding, dissolution, permeability, and passage through zones of indifferentiation that make possible state changes or changes of identity. This talk proposes that some key works by Goethe—above all, Die Wahlverwandtschaften and Faust II—aestheticize and existentialize the representational strategies of Schelling's Naturphilosophie. Identities become consolidated—and in certain cases, suspended or transformed—through a series of naturphilosophical operations that trascend subjectivity and that nevertheless become constitutive for a subject's sense of self.

Gabriel Trop is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In addition to articles about Hölderlin, Goethe, Wieland, and other authors, he has written a book entitled Poetry as a Way of Life: Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth Century published by Northwestern University Press.

Location 172 College Avenue, Seminar Room