I’m honoured to announce that my dissertation “Zeichen des Verfalls. Semantische Studien zur Entstehung der Kulturkritik im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert” has been awarded the dissertation prize 2011 of the Westfälisch-Lippische Universitätsgesellschaft.
The prize will be presented by the Gesellschafts chairman, Ortwin Goldbeck, on February 24th, 2012 at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Bielefeld.
An account of the ceremony with a photo is to be found here.
Posted in Honors | Tagged Dissertation, Linkedin, PhD, Prize, Westfälisch-Lippische Universitätsgesellschaft | 1 Comment »
An article I wrote on the concept of Counter-Enlightenment has been published in the proceedings of a conference I attended last year in Bern, Switzerland.
My contribution takes its starting point from the observation that a large part of the debate about the meaning(s) of Enlightenment in the present is structured around a pair of mutually exclusive counter-concepts: Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. Tracing this opposition back to its most influential proponent, Isaiah Berlin, and ultimately to its emergence in the Eighteenth Century itself, I argue for a less schematic approach taking into account recent historical research especially in the field of historical semantics. Thus, a better understanding of the different meanings and uses of the concepts of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment in the past may also shed light on our current debates about the relevance of the Enlightenment tradition to our own culture today.
The volume also includes interesting contributions by (among others) Claudia Honegger, Urs Stäheli, Hartmut Rosa and Andreas Langenohl. For more information, please click here and here.
Theo Jung, Gegenaufklärung. Ein Begriff zwischen Aufklärung und Gegenwart, in: Dietmar J. Wetzel (Hg.), Perspektiven der Aufklärung. Zwischen Mythos und Realität (= Laboratorium Aufklärung, Bd. 12), München 2012, S. 87–100.
Posted in Publications | Tagged Concept, Conference, Counter-Enlightenment, Enlightenment, Isaiah Berlin, Linkedin, Publication | Leave a Comment »
Next March, I will be attending the 33rd annual conference of the Ninteenth Century Studies Association in Asheville, North Carolina. The title of the paper I will present is ‘Spiritual Power in a Secular Age: The ‘Spirit of the Age’ in Early 19th Century Politics’.
For more information, see here.
Posted in Conference | Tagged Asheville, Concept, Conference, Historical Semantics, Nineteenth Century, North Carolina, Politics, Zeitgeist | Leave a Comment »
This winter semester, I will again be teaching two courses.
The Salon: a Form of Enlightened Sociability
The social life of the Ancien Régime has never lost its fascination. In many books and movies, a world is evoked in which beautifully dressed gentlemen and ladies cultivate a witty and light-footed conversation. The central and most famous form of this type of elitist sociability was, without a doubt, the salon. In this setting, an exquisite circle of guests of all sorts met under the gentle guidance of an elegant hostess. Drawing upon French and ‘German’ cases from the 18th and 19th centuries, this seminar studies the social, cultural and gender dimensions of this social form in their historical development. Its focus will lie on several questions which have been the subject of heated historiographical debate. Were these salons hatcheries of Enlightenment thought, of emerging civil society or of women’s emancipation, or did they rather represent a late – and ultimately dying – branch of aristocratic (court) culture? In the conversations that built the central element of any salon, what was the relationship between serious discussion and lighthearted amusement? Were the salons able to adjust to the new political environment after the French Revolution, or did the rise of bourgeois society spell their end?
Enlightenment and Revolution: Reading Course on French Sources
The French Revolution is often thought of as the birthplace of European modernity. Contemporaries were already very aware of its significance and debated about its various causes. Central among these was a diffuse set of phenomena that would gradually come to be subsumed under the title of ‘Enlightenment’. In this context, a controversial debate about the relationship between ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Revolution’ emerged that has not quieted down since. Reading French primary sources (pamphlets, theatre, speeches, lexicon articles, etc.), this course will trace the political dimension of the Enlightenment as it was understood before, during and after the French Revolution.
Posted in Teaching | Tagged Eighteenth Century, Enlightenment, Freiburg, French Revolution, History, Nineteenth Century, Salon, Seminar, Sociability | Leave a Comment »
I just received confirmation that the manuscript of my dissertation has been approved by the board of editors of the book series ‘Historische Semantik‘. This means that if all formalities add up, the final version of the text may appear in this prestigious series published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, a publishing house with a tradition going back more than 275 years. Though the process of editing will take some time, a publication date in 2012 seems feasible.
The editorial board consisted of Prof. Dr. Bernhard Jussen (Frankfurt / M), Prof. Dr. Christien Kiening (Zürich), Prof. Dr. Klaus Krüger (Berlin) and Prof. Dr. Willibald Steinmetz (Bielefeld).
Posted in Publications | Tagged Cultural Criticism, Historical Semantics, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht | 3 Comments »
Next Tuesday, June 7th, I will be presenting my new research project on the history of silence in the Research Colloquium organized by Prof. Dr. Leonhard and PD. Dr. Goltermann. Under the title: “At the limits of language: building blocks for a comparative history of silence in the ‘long’ 19th century’, I will address some major theoretical and methodological issues I would like to explore in a research project currently taking shape. All are welcome to attend.
Link to the programme.
Posted in Conference | Tagged Nineteenth Century, Presentation, Public Lecture, Research Colloquium, Silence | Leave a Comment »
Starting in Freiburg in the summer semester of 2011, I will be teaching two courses.
The Intellectual: Genesis of a Modern Social Type
The Dreyfus Affair is often viewed as the birth of the modern intellectual. In fact, however, the origins of this important ‘persona’ are much older and reach into the Enlightenment period. Taking a series of case studies from France, England and the German lands as a starting point, this BA-Seminar from a comparative perspective traces the emergence and development of this figure during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Besides questions of social structure, finance, forms of communication and use of media, its focus will be on the problematic relation of the intellectual (and his locus naturalis, the public realm) with the political.
Zeitgeist: History and Impact of a Controversial Concept
The concept of ‘zeitgeist’ or ‘spirit of the age’ has all but disappeared from our vocabulary. If used at all it is usually employed in an ironic mode. Yet at one time, this was remarkably different. For a long time, zeitgeist was the central concept within Western discourses of historical reflexion. It expressed the reflexion upon the present as a changing form of life and thus built the center of a historical consciousness that emerged at the onset of the modern era. This reading course (Übung) will trace the history of this modern concept from its beginnings in the seventeenth up to his heyday in the first half of the nineteenth century. On the basis of source material (pamphlets, journal articles, poetry, theatre) from the German, French and English language areas several questions will be posed, i. e.: what meanings did the concept convey and how did these change over time? In what contexts and to what purposes was it used? How was it instrumentalized for political aims? Against which social background did it arise and how did it influence this in turn? Thus, on the basis of this example, general question are put forward about the history of concepts and its method.
More information about these courses may be found here.
Posted in Teaching | Tagged Eighteenth Century, Enlightenment, Freiburg, History of Concepts, Intellectuals, Teaching, Zeitgeist | Leave a Comment »
As of April first, I will be moving to the University of Freiburg to start a new job as a Hochschulassistent (‘assistant professor’). I will be working under Professor Jörn Leonhard and ‘Privatdozentin’ (Private Lecturer) Svenja Goltermann at the Lehrstuhl für die Geschichte des Romanischen Westeuropa (chair for the History of the Romanesque Western Europe).
Besides teaching and other academic activities, I will start work on a new project on the ‘history of silence‘ in the long nineteenth century.
Posted in Jobs | Tagged Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology, Freiburg, History, Linkedin | Leave a Comment »
An article I wrote about the construction of the authorial identity in the eighteenth century was published in the issue »Beyond Biography« of the Journal InterDisciplines. It originates from a workshop on the »Semantics of (Self)Construction. (Auto-)Biography in Sociology and History in the 19th and 20th centuries«, held in Bielefeld (Germany) in January 2010.
Jung, Theo, „The writing self. Rousseau and the author’s identity“ InterDisciplines 1, Nr. 2 (2010) 91–121.
In 1749, while on the road to Vincennes to visit his friend Diderot in prison, Rousseau had an inspirational experience that prove to be a deciding moment in his life story. In his many autobiographical writings, he would time and again interpret this event as the seminal point of his identity as a writer. Taking the conflicting contemporary interpretations of the Vincennes episode as a starting point, this article asks in what way modern, post-subjectivist theories of the self can enrich our understanding of historical events, while at the same time providing answers to wider questions concerning the ways in which historically changing and contextually specific forms of what it means to be a self are constructed, intepreted, articulated and ›put into practice‹. To this end, Rousseau’s ›illumination‹ and its subsequent interpretations are interpreted in the light of contemporary controversies over the identity of the writer that developed against the background of fundamental changes in the social and economic structure of the literary field.
Posted in Publications | Tagged Article, Diderot, Eighteenth Century, Enlightenment, History, Linkedin, Literary World, Publication, Rousseau | Leave a Comment »
Last week, on December 15th, I had my Ph.D. exam (‘Disputation’). After a short presentation, a wide range of questions was posed to me by my supervisors (Prof. Steinmetz of the University of Bielefeld and Prof. Den Boer of the University of Amsterdam) and the other members of the committee (Prof. Papenheim and Prof. Epple). Some of the issues we spoke about were:
– is cultural criticism political or unpolitical in nature?
– is cultural criticism mainly a transnational, Western-European discourse? What role is played by national or language specific differences?
– should the discourse of cultural criticism be interpreted as the linguistic form of a particular social group? How should its intperpretation as ‘instrument’ in the hands of language users be weighed against its semantical properties that may – at least in part unconsciously – influence the actors understanding of themselves and the world?
The results were very satisfying (summa cum laude).
Posted in Honors | Tagged Cultural Criticism, Disputation, Linkedin, PhD | Leave a Comment »
Theo Jung 