Knowledge Power And Discipline

German Studies And National Identity

Pier Carlo Bontempelli

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Year: 2003
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780816694587
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

German Studies has confronted many crises, as well as severe criticism and self-criticism, and yet it has managed to maintain its disciplinary system through every upheaval—the revolution of 1848, the establishment of the Second Reich in 1871, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Third Reich, the Second World War and the reconstruction era, the creation and reunification of the two German states. Pier Carlo Bontempelli focuses on this continuity, dating back to the early nineteenth century, when the "founding fathers" of Germanistik secured its status by grounding it in a set of fixed principles, revived by each successive generation of scholars in order to legitimize their position of power—and to ensure their capacity for cultural reproduction. Using the works of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, Bontempelli investigates the institution and principles of German Studies and critically reconstructs its history. Mindful of the mechanisms of choice and domination operating at every turn, his book exposes the repressed social and political history of German Studies.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Metamorphoses of Domination and the Subject of German Studies
• 1. The Origins of Modern German Studies
• 2. Under the Aegis of Goethe: Liberal Historiography from Gervinus to Dilthey
• 3. The Science of Literature and the Steam Engine: Wilhelm Scherer and the Positivist School
• 4. Wilhelm Dilthey and Geistesgeschichte
• 5. German Studies in the Years of National Socialism
• 6. The Break in Political Continuity and the Continuity of the Disciplinary Apparatus, 1945–1968
• 7. The Dialectics of Rebellion: 1968 and Its Consequences
• 8. After 1968: Transforming the Canon, Shifting the Paradigms
• 9. Beyond the Year 2000: German Studies between New Approaches and the Resurgence of Philology
• Notes
• Index