German Romanticism

Harvard FAS

This course examines German Romanticism as a set of collective intellectual practices: a sustained, contentious experiment in thinking (and sometimes loving) together. We begin with the Romantic fragment and theory of irony as a social and formal framework, then trace how the central problem of German Idealism -- the fracture between self and world -- was answered differently depending on who was doing the answering and through what medium. Around the vibrant university town of Jena, Novalis…