The diverse group of theories known as “posthumanism” shares perhaps but one characteristic: the belief that humanism, in our historical moment, has been, or needs to be, overcome. This collection, containing an introduction and a series of fourteen papers, many by frequent contributors to the Goethe Yearbook, might well have been entitled: “On Humanism: Essays for its Cultured Despisers.” Its greatest virtue (and source of delight) is its construction of fascinating and often unexpected interfaces between, very broadly speaking, (post-)Kantian writers and natural scientists and various directions of today's posthumanist thought. These connections work both ways: not only do they provide new windows into older texts, more and less familiar, but also offer different ways of understanding the most contemporary of themes, from computational neuroscience to global capitalism. Another virtue of the collection is its very varied discussion of the different species of posthumanism; though names like N. Katherine Hayles, Cary Wolfe, and Rosi Braidotti recur in many papers along with the terms “speculative realism,” “critical posthumanism,” and “object-oriented ontology,” each author has a different take on the nature and balance of these different approaches. Most significant is the question everywhere in the background—but left as an exercise to the reader to answer—what do these texts and authors from the “Age of Humanism” have to tell us today?

The essays in this collection are uniformly lucid, balanced in length, and each addresses from its particular angle the relationship between present and past. Since there is not enough space to do justice to them all, perhaps a partial catalogue of the intriguing connections made within and implied between them can demonstrate the richness and breadth of coverage. First, we read of relationships between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers and natural scientists and contemporary cybernetic, systems, and posthumanist theories that demonstrate the constancy of fundamental questions at distinctly different levels of physiological and technological sophistication: Kant's friend, the doctor Markus Herz on vertigo and Marvin Minsky guiding electronic rats through mazes in the 1950's (Jeffrey Kirkwood); Fichtean intersubjectivity and the Turing-test robots of Ex Machina (Alex Hogue); the physiologist Johannes Müller and enactive autopoesis (Edgar Landgraf); Hufeland and Braidotti on the role of death in life (Jocelyn Holland); Gall's phrenology and Derrida's deconstruction of the human/ animal distinction (Patrick Fortmann); Hegel's nonhuman Geist and Bateson (John H. Smith).

George Gershwin has long been a challenging figure to categorize and evaluate within mainstream music historiography. Few have gone as far as the Russian composer Alexander Glazunov, who, after attending a performance of Rhapsody in Blue, deemed him “half human and half animal.” But music historians and chroniclers have reacted variably to the composer’s rather anomalous achievement and place in the history of Western music.

To explore and gauge such differing perspectives on Gershwin, in particular his more serious compositions, I have examined his coverage – or lack thereof – among a fairly broad range of mainly American texts on Western and in particular American and twentieth-century concert music.

Introduction

E.T.A. Hoffmann's story Prinzessin Brambilla (Princess Brambilla, 1820) has been read in many ways, for example, as a version of Schiller's aesthetic education (Slessarev); as a summary or satire of Fichte's or Schelling's idealism (Frischmann); as a handbook of sorts for Romantic irony (Strohschneider- Kohrs 155–60 and 362–424); or as a proto-modernist depiction of an initiation rite (Wellbery). Above all it is an apotheosis of the aesthetic on many levels. Not only does the work describe and evaluate a number of art objects of various forms as well as feature a variety of performances – architecture, cooking, costumes, dance, music, narration, a theatrical presentation, even a ‘flash mob’ as part of a Gesamtkunstwerk of sorts – it also claims to be derived from a series of sketches by the eighteenth-century French artist Jacques Callot. As an illustrated book, it exhibits these pictures as well as its own exhibition of them. It is also prominently a theater book, a book whose central character is an actor and whose fundamental plot achievement is a change in a city's aesthetic taste. These aesthetic events, like the carnival time which forms the setting of the story, transgress and overflow conventional distinctions, at times confusing and at times mediating between a variety of different categories: not only artistic media (as in the interplay between the text and the images), but also between nations (a German book about Rome, with a chorus of expat German artists), between reality and the virtual, between art and nature, existentially, between life and death, and, most importantly for my purposes here, between the private and the public. The narrative is divided between the thoughts and, at times, delusions of the main characters and their publicly visible actions, and much emphasis is placed on the relationship between the two, which serves to define and defend the rights of art and the imagination in public space. Prinzessin Brambilla, among its other achievements, is a key text in the history of aesthetic subjectivity in a mass society.

Any attempt at an overview of this “Capriccio after Jacques Callot” (119) must necessarily oversimplify, but this most complicated and confusing story in eight chapters is fundamentally structured as a romantic comedy, though with two additional layers of narrative.