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6 results

  • 20 - Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–1869)

  • from V - Some major critics of the period
  • Edited by M. A. R. Habib, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
  • Published online: 05 February 2013
  • Print publication: 07 February 2013, pp 379-392

  • Summary

    Nineteenth-century German literature has often been regarded as suffering from the disabling condition of provincialism. This shortcoming is felt with particular urgency in respect of the literary genre that emerges as the central expression of modern life from the late eighteenth century on: the Realistic novel. The Bildungsroman is often claimed to be a particularly German novel form. At one level, it has at its centre an experiential focus that is familiar from a number of key works of European Realism, for it explores the processes by which a young person is initiated into the ways of the world. Gottfried Keller's Green Henry offers a superlatively rich and complex understanding of the ways in which and the extent to which society is constituted not just of material things, but also of mental processes, of ideas, assumptions, values and symbolizations.

  • Scholarship after the end of history*

  • Wolf Lepenies
  • Journal: European Review / Volume 5 / Issue 3 / July 1997
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 July 2009, pp. 275-288

  • We are living in a period of great changes in public attitudes, particularly in Eastern Europe. These changes affect our mental attitudes, employment patterns and economic prospects. These and other aspects of modern life are reviewed. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

  • Culture, politics and the European intelligentsia

  • WOLF LEPENIES
  • Journal: European Review / Volume 9 / Issue 2 / May 2001
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 June 2001, pp. 147-158

  • A distinctive German culture no longer exists, it has become merged into Western culture. De-Nazification foundered and the old elites and the émigrés re-emerged and came together. The November revolution in the GDR was not one of either the workers or of a cultural elite but one of the grassroots, the ordinary people; however the GDR lacked any cultural modernity. When a country loses a war, cultural policy has to serve the need for revenge. France and Germany have competed on which was more revolutionary in the past and who had the greater potential for future revolutions. The current dilemma, however, over the enlargement of Europe rests more on harsh economic problems of how to reconcile the desires of the have-nots with the desire of the haves to have more, and who feel threatened by the have-nots.

  • 7 - ‘Interesting questions’ in the history of philosophy and elsewhere

  • Edited by Richard Rorty, Jerome B. Schneewind, Quentin Skinner
  • Book: Philosophy in History
  • Published online: 03 December 2009
  • Print publication: 08 November 1984, pp 141-172

  • Summary

    Die Einzelwissenschaften wissen oft

    gar nicht, durch welche Faeden sie

    von den Gedanken der grossen Philosophen

    abhaengen.

    Jacob Burckhardt

    Introduction: a glance at the history of science

    It was a philosophical system that provoked one of the most powerful attacks on historical thinking to date, or at least the overemphasis on it. Friedrich Nietzsche's early essay on The Use and Abuse of History (1873–4) scorned the predominance of history in nineteenth-century German culture, as an unmistakable sign of decadence for which above all one man was responsible – Hegel, who identified reason in everything historical and for whom eventually the highest and final stage of the world process came together in his own Berlin existence. Nietzsche's attack continues to be illuminating even if we remove it from its original context. While dealing with modern science and scholarship, large parts of his essay can also be read as addressing the use and abuse of the history of science, a field in which the illusion of scientific progress and the aberration of historical thinking merge:

    The progress of science has been amazingly rapid in the last decade; but consider the savants, those exhausted hens. They are certainly not ‘harmonious’ natures; they can merely cackle more than before, because they lay eggs oftener; but the eggs are always smaller though the books are bigger.

    (Nietzsche 1957:46)

    The history of science, with its more than occasional output of very big books, has not enjoyed a particularly good reputation among scientists.