Download or read book Goethe s Concept of the Daemonic written by Angus James Nicholls and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2006 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to examine Goethe's writings on the daemonic in relation to both Classical philosophy and German Idealism. For Plato, the daemonic is a sensibility that brings individuals into contact with divine knowledge; Socrates was also inspired by a "divine voice" known as his "daimonion." Goethe was introduced to this ancient concept by Hamannand Herder, who associated it with the aesthetic category of genius. This book shows how the young Goethe depicted the idea of daemonic genius in works of the Storm and Stress period, before exploring the daemonic in a series of later poetic and autobiographical works. Reading Goethe's works on the daemonic through theorists such as Lukács, Benjamin, Gadamer, Adorno, and Blumenberg, Nicholls contends that they contain arguments concerning reason, nature, and subjectivity that are central to both European Romanticism and the Enlightenment. Angus Nicholls is Claussen-Simon Foundation Research Lecturer in German and Comparative Literature at the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations in the Department of German, Queen Mary, University of London.
Download or read book Demonic History written by Kirk Wetters and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-31 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this ambitious book, Kirk Wetters traces the genealogy of the demonic in German literature from its imbrications in Goethe to its varying legacies in the work of essential authors, both canonical and less well known, such as Gundolf, Spengler, Benjamin, Lukács, and Doderer. Wetters focuses especially on the philological and metaphorological resonances of the demonic from its core formations through its appropriations in the tumultuous twentieth century. Propelled by equal parts theoretical and historical acumen, Wetters explores the ways in which the question of the demonic has been employed to multiple theoretical, literary, and historico-political ends. He thereby produces an intellectual history that will be consequential both to scholars of German literature and to comparatists.
Download or read book Conversations with Eckermann written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and published by . This book was released on 1901 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dr Faustus written by Christopher Marlowe and published by Gildan Media LLC aka G&D Media. This book was released on 2024-01-16 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dr. Faustus is a great Elizabethan tragedy by Christopher Marlow originally published in 1600. The story is based on an earlier anonymous classic German legend involving worldly ambition, black magic and surrender to the devil. It remains one of the most famous plays of the English Renaissance. Dr. John Faustus, a brilliant, well-respected German doctor grows dissatisfied with the limits of human knowledge - logic, medicine, law, and religion, and decides that he has learned all that can be learned by conventional means. What is left for him, he thinks, but magic. His friends instruct him in the black arts, and he begins his new career as a magician by summoning up Mephastophilis, a devil. Despite Mephastophilis’s warnings about the horrors of hell, Faustus tells the devil to return to his master, Lucifer, with an offer of Faustus’s soul in exchange for twenty-four years of service from Mephastophilis. On the final night before the expiration of the twenty-four years, Faustus is overcome by fear and remorse. He begs for mercy, but it is too late. At midnight, a host of devils appears and carries his soul off to hell. Marlowe’s dramatic interpretation of the Faust legend is a theatrical masterpiece. With immense poetic skill, and psychological insight that greatly influenced the works of William Shakespeare and other dramatists, Dr. Faustus combines soaring poetry, psychological depth, and grand stage spectacle. Marlowe created powerful scenes that invest the work with tragic dignity, among them the doomed man’s calling upon Christ to save him and his ultimate rejection of salvation for the embrace of Helen of Troy.
Download or read book Faustus written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and published by . This book was released on 1821 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Practices of the Enlightenment written by Dorothea E. von Mücke and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinking the relationship between eighteenth-century Pietist traditions and Enlightenment thought and practice, The Practices of Enlightenment unravels the complex and often neglected religious origins of modern secular discourse. Mapping surprising routes of exchange between the religious and aesthetic writings of the period and recentering concerns of authorship and audience, this book revitalizes scholarship on the Enlightenment. By engaging with three critical categories—aesthetics, authorship, and the public sphere—The Practices of Enlightenment illuminates the relationship between religious and aesthetic modes of reflective contemplation, autobiography and the hermeneutics of the self, and the discursive creation of the public sphere. Focusing largely on German intellectual life, this critical engagement also extends to France through Rousseau and to England through Shaftesbury. Rereading canonical works and lesser-known texts by Goethe, Lessing, and Herder, the book challenges common narratives recounting the rise of empiricist philosophy, the idea of the "sensible" individual, and the notion of the modern author as celebrity, bringing new perspective to the Enlightenment concepts of instinct, drive, genius, and the public sphere.
Download or read book Three Philosophical Poets written by George Santayana and published by Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University. This book was released on 1910 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Goethe s Exposure Of Newton s Theory A Polemic On Newton s Theory Of Light And Colour written by Michael John Duck and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2016-03-11 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, although best known for his literary work, was also a keen and outspoken natural scientist. In the second polemic part of Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours), for example, Goethe attacked Isaac Newton's ground-breaking revelation that light is heterogeneous and not immutable, as was previously thought.This polemic was unanimously rejected by the physicists of the day, and has often been omitted from compendia of Goethe's works. Indeed, although Goethe repeated all of Newton's key experiments, he was never able to achieve the same results. Many reasons have been proposed for this, ranging from the psychological — such as a blind hatred of Newtonism, self-deceit and paranoid psychosis — to accusations of incapability — Goethe simply did not understand the experiments. Yet Goethe was never to be dissuaded from this passionate conviction.This translation of Goethe's polemic, published for the first time in English, makes it clear that Goethe did understand the thrust of Newton's logic. It demonstrates that Goethe's resistance to Newton's theory stemmed from something quite different; his pantheism — the belief in the spiritual nature of light. This prevented him from allowing himself to think of light in physical terms and accepting that it is anything other than simple, immutable, and unknowable.This important new translation will be useful to natural scientists, historians, philosophers and theologians alike and will delight anyone hoping to add a further layer of nuance to Goethe's complex portrait.
Download or read book H lderlin Kleist and Nietzsche written by Stefan Zweig and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2011 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the second volume in a trilogy in which Stefan Zweig builds a composite picture of the European mind through intellectual portraits selected from among its most representative and influential figures. In Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche, Zweig concentrates on three giants of German literature to portray the artist and thinker as a figure possessed by a powerful inner vision at odds with the materialism and scientific positivism of his time, in this case, the nineteenth century. Zweig's subjects here are respectively a lyric poet, a dramatist and writer of novellas, and a philosopher. Each led an unstable life ending in madness and/or suicide and not until the twentieth century did each make their full impact. Whereas the nineteenth-century novel is socially capacious in terms of subject and audience, the three figures treated here are prophets or forerunners of modernist ideas of alienation and exile. Hölderlin and Kleist consciously opposed the worldly harmoniousness of Goethe's classicism in favor of a visionary inwardness and dramatization of the subjective psyche. Nietzsche set himself as a destroyer and rebuilder of philosophy and critic of the degradation of the German spirit through nationalism and militarism. Zweig's choice of subjects reflects a division in his own soul. The image of Goethe recurs here as the ultimate upholder of Zweig's own ideals: scientist and artist, receptive to world culture, supremely rational and prudent. Yet Zweig was aware that Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche were more daring explorers of the dangerous and destructive aspects of man that needed to be seen and comprehended in the clarifying light of poetry and philosophy.
Download or read book All that is Solid Melts Into Air written by Marshall Berman and published by Verso. This book was released on 1983 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.
Download or read book Goethe s Poetry and the Philosophy of Nature written by Regina Sachers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-23 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the beginning of the nineteenth century, philosophy and theology come under increasing pressure owing to the emergence of the modern sciences. The collection Gott und Welt is Goethe's poetic contribution to this conflict, in which an alternative to orthodox Christianity was being sought. Following the collection's various stages of composition and publication, this study offers new readings of some of Goethe's best known poems: 'Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen', 'Dauer im Wechsel', 'Urworte. Orphisch' and 'Wiederfinden'. Sachers shows that Gott und Welt is the long poem on nature which Goethe attempted to write for the last third of his life. As such it represents Goethe's unique answers to the intellectual challenges posed by the dawning age of science. Regina Sachers is Lecturer in German at Exeter College, Oxford.
Download or read book Germany s Conscience written by Reinbert Krol and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2021-06-30 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Questions of truth, ethics, state power, and propaganda, of how to render account of catastrophes and reconcile oneself with one's past are not only crucial to our time, they were also central to the German historian Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954). Probably no generation of historians before Meinecke had lived through more unsettling transformations, during which these questions were most pressing. Reinbert Krol's analysis of Meinecke's intellectual development does not only give us insight into his philosophy of history - which turns out to be more conciliatory than previously assumed - it can also be a source of inspiration for scholars of history today.
Download or read book Genealogies of Genius written by Joyce E. Chaplin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-08 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume seek to examine the uses to which concepts of genius have been put in different cultures and times. Collectively, they are designed to make two new statements. First, seen in historical and comparative perspective, genius is not a natural fact and universal human constant that has been only recently identified by modern science, but instead a categorical mode of assessing human ability and merit. Second, as a concept with specific definitions and resonances, genius has performed specific cultural work within each of the societies in which it had a historical presence.
Download or read book Faust written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and published by . This book was released on 1855 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Very Late Goethe written by Charlotte Lee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Goethe's career was an unusually long and productive one: he became a literary celebrity in the 1770s and remained so until his death in 1832. The distinguishing feature of his last works is their self-consciousness, their preoccupation both with the business of writing and with personal development. In the first cross-genre study of this period of Goethe's work, Charlotte Lee traces the theme in his last major poems and autobiographical writings, before turning to the two 'giants', 'Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre' and 'Faust II'. All these works share a tendency to allude subtly to earlier moments from Goethe's own literary output, but to fashion them into writing which is quite new - even though (or perhaps because) he himself is old. This book seeks to understand the unique perspective of one nearing the end of a long life.
Download or read book Walter Benjamin s Concept of the Image written by Alison Ross and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-10 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Alison Ross engages in a detailed study of Walter Benjamin’s concept of the image, exploring the significant shifts in Benjamin’s approach to the topic over the course of his career. Using Kant’s treatment of the topic of sensuous form in his aesthetics as a comparative reference, Ross argues that Benjamin’s thinking on the image undergoes a major shift between his 1924 essay on ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities,’ and his work on The Arcades Project from 1927 up until his death in 1940. The two periods of Benjamin’s writing share a conception of the image as a potent sensuous force able to provide a frame of existential meaning. In the earlier period this function attracts Benjamin’s critical attention, whereas in the later he mobilises it for revolutionary outcomes. The book gives a critical treatment of the shifting assumptions in Benjamin’s writing about the image that warrant this altered view. It draws on hermeneutic studies of meaning, scholarship in the history of religions and key texts from the modern history of aesthetics to track the reversals and contradictions in the meaning functions that Benjamin attaches to the image in the different periods of his thinking. Above all, it shows the relevance of a critical consideration of Benjamin’s writing on the image for scholarship in visual culture, critical theory, aesthetics and philosophy more broadly.
Download or read book Islam and Romanticism written by Jeffrey Einboden and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-11-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revealing Islam’s formative influence on literary Romanticism, this book recounts a lively narrative of religious and aesthetic exchange, mapping the impact of Muslim sources on the West’s most seminal authors. Spanning continents and centuries, the book surveys Islamic receptions that bridge Romantic periods and personalities, unfolding from Europe, to Britain, to America, embracing iconic figures from Goethe, to Byron, to Emerson, as well as authors less widely recognized, such as Joseph Hammer-Purgstall. Broad in historical scope, Islam and Romanticism is also particular in personal detail, exposing Islam’s role as a creative catalyst, but also as a spiritual resource, with the Qur’an and Sufi poetry infusing the literary publications, but also the private lives, of Romantic writers. Highlighting cultural encounter, rather than political exploitation, the book differs from previous treatments by accenting Western receptions that transcend mere “Orientalism”, finding the genesis of a global literary culture first emerging in the Romantics’ early appeal to Islamic traditions.
