Philosophy and Literary Theory

Perhaps the most exciting development of the last five years in the department has been the refocusing on questions of literature and philosophy, with the hiring of Professors Hewitt, McCumber, Presner, and Wild. Our belief is that scholars in the humanities must necessarily engage traditions of thought rooted in German intellectual history – the Reformation, German Idealism, Psychoanalysis, Marxism, Critical Theory, etc. -- and that the role of the department is to provide such expertise across the disciplines. Our students are among the most theoretically sophisticated on campus. We see ourselves as engaged, in every sense of the word, with the dialectic of the Enlightenment, conceived in the broadest historical terms.

While we seek to represent the work of the so-called "master thinkers" of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment, German philosophy is also the main source of postmodern literary, cultural, and political theory. When Derrida thinks in the name of Heideggerean Destruktion and Foucault speaks of Nietzschean Genealogie, it is no idle word play.

Among the philosophers taught in the Germanic Languages Department are Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Gadamer, and Habermas.

All philosophy courses are taught in English translation.