Royal Holloway, University of London
Humanities and Arts Research Centre
Thursday 24th April. Main Lecture Theatre, Founder's Building. 5.30pm.
Dorothea von Muecke (Columbia University) will lecture on
Gift and Sacrifice in Goethe's 'The Bride of Corinth'
This talk will analyze this ballad in view of its engagement with an
anthropological discourse on gift and sacrifice, as it is already prefigured
in Schiller's poem "The Gods of Greece." This analysis will allow us to put
Goethe's critique of Christianity into a sharper focus and force us to
rethink Goethe's take on the Christian attitude towards human sexuality. It
will also yield new insights into Goethe's poetological take on the autonomy
of art of that period in his work, as opposed to his earlier position of the
Storm and Stress period.
Biographical note
Dorothea von Muecke obtained her PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford
University after having studied at Mannheim, Princeton and Stanford. She has
held a visiting professorship at the Institut für Allgemeine und
Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft at the Freie Universität Berlin and has
been a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
at Stanford. Currently she is Professor of German at Columbia University in
New York City.
.
Her books include:
Virtue and the Veil of Illusion. Generic Innovation and the Pedagogical
Project in Eighteeenth-Century Literature (Stanford, 1991), The Seduction of
the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale (Stanford, 2003), and Body and
Text in the Eighteenth Century (Stanford, 1994) (with Veronica Kelly). She
is also a co-author of The New History of German Literature, forthcoming
with Harvard University Press.
ALL WELCOME!
Máire Davies Dean of the
Faculty of Arts
Department of German Tel:
+44(0)1784-443194
Royal Holloway
University of London
Egham
Surrey TW20 0EX
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