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Posts Tagged ‘Temporalization’

Publication on the Historical Development of Cultural Criticism

Posted in Publications, tagged , , , , on April 3, 2016| Leave a Comment »

The proceedings of a conference I attended two years ago in Heidelberg have been published as volume 18 in the series Schriften zur politischen Kultur der Weimarer Republik by Peter Lang.

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My own contribution, titled

Eine “Klage, die so alt ist, als die Geschichte”? Dimensionen des Wandels im Diskurs der modernen Kulturkritik

(A “Complaint as old as History itself”? Dimensions of Change in the Discourse of Modern Cultural Criticism)

develops an analytical model to describe four dimensions of change in the modern discourse of cultural criticism since the late eighteenth century.

[EDIT: the text is now available online here.]

Click here for the volume’s contents, a short introductory text, part of the introduction and the publisher’s page.

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Traverse-Workshop on Temporal Experience

Posted in Conference, Presentation, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on August 28, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Next week, I will be presenting a paper at an academic workshop organized by Juri Auderset, Andreas Behr, Philipp Müller and Aline Steinbrecher at the University of Fribourg (CH). The workshop’s topic is “Zeiterfahrung. Untersuchungen über Beschleunigung und Entschleunigung von Geschichte” (Temporal Experience: Studies on Acceleration and Deceleration in History). It’s ultimate goal is to prepare a special issue of the journal Traverse: Zeitschrift für Geschichte in 2016.

The topic of my paper is the variety of discourses of acceleration in nineteenth century germany. Considering the influential views of accelleration formulated by Hartmut Rosa and Reinhart Koselleck in terms of attempts at a general temporal theory of modernization, the paper points to the method of Historical Semantics as a way to more fruitfully  consider the plurality of experiences and discourses of temporality in this period. Instead of searching for a single, specific temporality of the modern era, the paper argues for a differentiated view of the pluriform ways in which contemporaries experienced the temporal nature of their own present.

See here for the call for fapers and here for the workshop’s program.

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Article in Contributions to the History of Concepts

Posted in Publications, tagged , , , , , on July 16, 2014| Leave a Comment »

An article I wrote for the Contributions to the History of Concepts has been published in volume 9, number 1 of this journal.

The article traces the uses of the concept of zeitgeist in early nineteenth-century European political discourse. To explain the concept’s explosive takeoff in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, two perspectives are combined. On the one hand, the concept is shown to be a key element in the new, “temporalized” discourses of cultural reflection emerging during this time. On the other, its pragmatic value as a linguistic tool in concrete political constellations is outlined on the basis of case studies from French, British and German political discourse. Developing this two-sided perspective, the article sheds light on an important aspect of early nineteenth-century political discourse while also pointing to some general considerations concering the relationship between semantic and pragmatic analyses of historical language use.

LOGO

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Articles on Freidoks

Posted in Publications, tagged , , , , , , , , , on February 17, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Some of my writing has been made available online through the Freidoks server at Freiburg University.

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Lecture on the Origins of Modernity

Posted in Teaching, tagged , , , , , , on February 10, 2014| Leave a Comment »

On December 2nd, I will present a lecture within the framework of a series titled “New Research in History”.

In this series, which is directed specifically at highschool teachers and students aspiring to become teachers, fifteen historians from Freiburg University present the current ‘state of the art’ in their respective fields of expertise. They ask which current developments in the academic historical discipline are such that they deserve incorporation into the history curricula at the highschool level. How has our understanding of history changed and how may this be reflected in history teaching?

My lecture will be concerned with the origins of modernity in the so-called ‘Sattelzeit’ era. Its title is:

Anfang der Moderne. Die ‚Sattelzeit‘ (ca. 1750-1850) in atlantischer Perspektive

(The Onset of Modernity. The ‘Sattelzeit’ (ca. 1750-1850) in Atlantic Perspective)

For more information, click here.
For the series’ program, click here.

 

Addition (February 10, 2014)

The powerpoint file of this presentation has been made available through the website and may be found here.

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Teaching Summer 2013: Politeness and the History of Time

Posted in Teaching, tagged , , , , , on March 28, 2013| Leave a Comment »

This summer semester I will be teaching one master seminar and an exercise course on the reading of French sources. As usual, I have assembled a ‘pearltree’ for each of these courses with weblinks to the specific themes.

A History of Time – Changing Cultures of Temporality (ca. 1750-1850)
(Pearltree – websites on this topic)

and

Politeness – Sources on the History of Manners in France (ca. 1700-1850)
(Pearltree – websites on this topic)

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Article on the Concept of the ‘Spirit of the Age’

Posted in Publications, tagged , , , , , , , , on September 18, 2012| Leave a Comment »

An article I wrote about the concept of the ‘spirit of the age’ in the long Eighteenth Century has been published in the volume Frühe Neue Zeiten, edited by Prof. Dr. Achim Landwehr.

Zeitgeist im langen 18. Jahrhundert. Dimensionen eines umstrittenen Begriffs, in: Achim Landwehr (Hg.): Frühe Neue Zeiten. Zeitwissen zwischen Reformation und Revolution (= Mainzer Historische Kulturwissenschaften 11), Bielefeld: transcript 2012, S. 319–355.

In my article, I trace the meanings and usages of the concept of zeitgeist in its various forms (esprit du siècle, Geist der Zeit, spirit of the age, etc.) across a number of contexts in France, England and the German lands. The concept is shown to be at the center of the temporalization of discourses about contemporary culture and its historical development during the Eighteenth Century. A special focus of the article lies on the complicated relation between the unstressed usages of the concept on the one hand and the explicit, metalinguistic discussion about it on the other. Because of its controversial and elusive nature, the concept of the spirit of the age was at the center of heated debates about its cognitive and metaphysical legitimacy and its pragmatic usefulness. How did such debates influence its use in other contexts?

To read the Achim Landwehr’s introduction to the volume, click here.

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Article on Reinhart Koselleck’s Concept of Temporalization

Posted in Publications, tagged , , , , , , on July 2, 2012| Leave a Comment »

After a long publishing process, an article I wrote in 2010 has now been published in Moderne: Kulturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch. In it, I survey the analytical strengths and weaknesses of Reinhart Koselleck’s theorem of temporalization for empirical research in the humanities. Considering it’s origins in modernization theory and giving it’s various critics due attention, I argue that the concept – in an updated, more pluralized form – may still be fruitfully applied in historiographical research.

The volume may be purchased here.

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Two Conference Papers

Posted in Conference, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 24, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Last week, I presented a paper at the conference ‘The Changing Experience of Time in the Long Nineteenth Century: Local, Regional, (Trans)National and Global Perspectives‘, held at the Centre for Transnational History of the University of St. Andrews (Scotland). My presentation was concerned with different models of historical analysis of the changing experiences and practices of time, especially with the so-called model of ‘temporalization’ which has been primarily championed by the German historian Reinhart Koselleck. Its title was:

Modern Times: Temporalization as a Concept of Historical Analysis

Also, I’m happy to announce that next month, I’m presenting other research at a conference ‘Populäre Geschichte und medialer Wandel zwischen Fortschrittsoptimismus und Kulturpessimismus‘, organized by the DFG-research group ‘Historische Lebenswelten in populären Wissenskulturen der Gegenwart‘ (DFG-FOR 875). This time, my topic will be a narrative of cultural interpretation that was quite influential at the end of the 18th century, which interpreted history as a slow evolution from a ‘poetic’ to a ‘prosaic’ mode of existence. The title of my presentation will be:

Vom poetischen Ursprung zur prosaischen Gegenwart: ein kulturanalytisches Geschichtsnarrativ im späten 18. Jahrhundert
(From poetic origin to prosaic present: a historical narrative of cultural analysis at the end of the 18th century)

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