Join Agnes Scott College’s German Studies Program and the Goethe Center Atlanta on September 20, 7pm for a free reading and presentation with Andrea Wulf. Click here for more information and to rsvp.
Did you take a “selfie” in the last 24 hours? And did you post it on Instagram or another social media platform? Are emotional connections with the world important to you?
If you said yes to any of the above questions you are continuing a practice of perceiving your self in the world that started back in the late 1700s in the literary and philosophical circles of England and Germany. Andrea Wulf explores this history in her most recent book, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of The Self. The core of the book revolves around a group of people with very prominent names in German cultural history: Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Schlegel, and Schelling once belonged to the list of writers and thinkers whose works formed the canonical reading list for every highschool and college student. For many good reasons, this male and exclusionary idea of the canon has been put to rest. German literature today is being reshaped by a wide range of diverse authors from all over the world, and along with it the idea of German culture. But the ways in which these early Romantics talked and wrote about their feelings and how they perceived themselves in a modernizing world resonate until today.
Wulf demonstrates that rereading these older philosophers and thinkers in 2022 doesn’t have to be a backwards exercise. Rather, while she’s not silent about these authors’ often privileged professional and private lives, Wulf underscores that their works hold important keys for understanding today’s ideas of self, identity, and emotion. Centering her narrative on the city of Jena, a small town in what was then the duchy of Weimar-Saxony, Wulf also reaffirms the crucial but repeatedly silenced roles of women in this particular history. Caroline Schlegel appears as a fascinating intellectual contributor to the literary and cultural debates of the time and forms an important example for the need to retell this history from a new angle.
Please join us on Tuesday, September 20, at 7pm for a reading and presentation by Andrea Wulf, followed by a reception. This event is free and open to the public and co-hosted by Agnes Scott College’s German Studies Program and the Atlanta Goethe Center. We are grateful for The Halle Foundation’s generous support for this event.
For more information about the location and to register please click here.
P.S.: If the name Andrea Wulf sounds familiar to you it’s not a coincidence: She read and presented her NYT bestselling book The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World at Agnes Scott College in 2018.
German Studies @ Agnes Scott 