Eva Stubenrauch, Talk: “Theory or Method? Jost Hermand and the Social Dimension of Literature.”

Co-sponsored by the UW Center for German & European Studies.

For almost six decades, Jost Hermand was one of the most renowned and influential social historians of literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, widely acknowledged on both sides of the Atlantic. What made him an outstanding intellectual figure – besides his amazing productivity – was the fact that he developed the basic principles of his approach to both the history of literature and the history of literary studies around 1970 and then held on to them throughout the following decades. Of course, Hermand consistently commented on the many new theoretical positions emerging since the 1970s, but only to defend, fortify and further develop the views and notions he presented in his earlier works. This characteristic of his role within literary studies, somewhere in between commitment and stubbornness, might have something to do with personality and biography. However, it also makes Hermand an interesting phenomenon in the history of the humanities. His work might also be an outstanding example for the ways in which the reform spirit of the late 1960s and early 1970s in fact prevailed in later decades and lived on as a constant reminder of past political claims to be worked through by younger generations. The lecture will explore these relationships by treating Hermand less as a ‘Germanist’ than as a phenomenon of intellectual history.

Eva Stubenrauch is postdoc lecturer at the Humboldt University in Berlin. She studied German literature, philosophy and history at the universities of Koblenz and Trier and received her PhD at the University of Bonn. Her dissertation analyzed aesthetic visions of the future in literary and non-literary texts since the eighteenth century. Now her research focuses on historical transformations and innovations of literary theory in the twentieth century. Her publications include: Die Ordnung der Zukunft. Ästhetische Verfahren der Zeitmodellierung seit dem 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter 2023); “Pulp Theory. Theorieaneignung als populäre Kultur,” in Pop-Zeitschrift (11 Nov. 2023); “Gespräche von Gewicht. Epitextuelle Theorieproduktion in Interviews mit Michel Foucault und Judith Butler,” in Michael Gamper, Wolfgang Hottner (Hg.), Paratexte der Theorie (Berlin: Berlin UP, forthcoming).