John H. SmithProfessor, German Chair, German |
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Research Interests |
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and intellectual history, literary theory | |
| URL | www.humanities.uci.edu/german/people/jsmith/jsmith.htm | |
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Research Abstract |
My research has generally focused on the German philosophical tradition from the Enlightenment to the present. Already in graduate school I realized that it is often easier (and more interesting) to work on such thinkers as Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and Habermas in a German rather than a philosophy department, esp. if one wants to devote attention to their language. My first book, The Spirit and Its Letter: Traces of Rhetoric in Hegel’s Philosophy of Bildung, looked at the role that rhetoric played in the formation of Hegel’s thought. Methodologically the book combines institutional history, hermeneutics, critical theory, and deconstruction. My next book, Dialectics of the Will: Freedom, Power, and Understanding in Modern French and German Thought, explored the viability of a dialectical concept of the will to rethink human agency after the “death of the subject.” At present I am working on a broad historical survey of (mostly) German (Protestant) theologies and philosophies of religion, from Luther and Erasmus to the present, to investigate the tradition that both provided some of the most fundamental modern conceptions of God and led to his “death.” Indeed, I hope to show that these two aspects of the tradition have always been in dialogue. My teaching reflects these interests in intellectual history with courses such as “The Death of God and the Return of Religion” and “German Philosophy for Critical Theory.” But I also believe in offering students, undergraduates and graduates, a strong background in German literary history (the Bildungsroman, the Novelle, lyric). |
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| Publications |
Selected Publications German Philosophy for Critical Theory. Work in progress. Dialogues Between Faith and Reason: The Death of God and the Return of Religion. Work in progress. Dialectics of the Will: Freedom, Power, and Understanding in Modern French and German Thought (Wayne State UP, 2000). The Spirit and Its Letter: Traces of Rhetoric in Hegel's Philosophy of Bildung. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1988. Articles “A General Model of Postcolonial Agency.” In Postcolonial Studies (Melbourne, Australia). (forthcoming) “Rhetorik und Stylistik in der Philosophie / Rhetoric and Stylistics in Philosophy.” Encyclopedia entry for Rhetoric and Stylistics: An International Handbook of Historical and Systematic Research. Ed. Ulla Fix, Andreas Gardt and Joachim Knape. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter (forthcoming). “Good Willing and the Practice of Friendship—A Dialogue.” Literary Paternity/Literary Friendship. Ed. Gerhard Richter, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002 (17-38). “Thesen über den deutschen Willen.” Die nationale Identität der Deutschen: Philosophische Imaginationen und historische Realität deutscher Mentalität. Ed. Wolfgang Bialas. Frankfurt a.M./Berlin: Peter Lang, 2002 (231-48). “Lessings didaktisch-dialektisches Testament für uns, ‘die wir itzt leben’; oder, How Erziehung Makes a Difference.” Lessing-Yearbook [Eds. Georg Braungart and Richard Schade]. 1999. “Of Spirit(s) and Will(s).” Hegel After Derrida. Ed. Stuart Barnett. New York and London: Routledge, 1998. 64-90. “Nietzsche’s ‘Will to Power’: Politics Beyond (Hegelian) Recognition.” New German Critique 73 (Summer, 1998) 133-63. “Does Feminism Have/Need a Will of its Own?” Proceedings of the Fifth Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas (ISSEI), Memory, History, and Critique: European Identity at the Millenium. Eds. Frank Brinkhuis and Sascha Talmor. Cambridge: MIT Press (CD Rom), 1997 (17 ms. pages). “Sighting the Spirit: Rhetorical Visions of Geist in Hegel’s Enzyklopädie.” Sites of Vision: The Discursive Construction of Sight in the History of Philosophy. Ed. David M. Levin. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997. 241-64. “Wie männlich ist der Wille? Ein ethischer Grundbegriff, andersrum.” Wann ist ein Mann ein Mann? Ed. Walter Erhart. Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 1997. 114-33. “Was erben wir vom Willen der Aufklärung?” Nach der Aufklärung? Beiträge zum Diskurs der Kulturwissenschaften. Eds. Wolfgang Klein and Waltraud-Naumann Beyer. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995. 263-76. “Queering the Will.” Spec Issue of symploke (The Next Generation) 3.1 (Winter, 1995) 7-28. “The Language of Mastery and the Mastery of Language: The Recognition of Rhetoric in Hegel.” Spec. issue of Clio, A Journal of Literature, History, Philosophy of History (Donald P. Verene. Memory and Imagination: Hegel, Vico, and Cassirer) 23.4 (Summer 1994) 377-395. “The ‘Transcendance’ of the Individual." Diacritics 19.2 (1989) 80-98. “Abulia: Sexuality and Diseases of the Will in the Late Nineteenth Century.” Genders 6 (Fall 1989) 102-124. “Cultivating Gender: Sexual Difference and (the) Bildung(sroman).” Spec. issue of Michigan German Studies (on the Bildungsroman) 13.2 (Fall 1987) 206-225. “U-Topian Hegel: Dialectic and its Other in Poststructuralism." German Quarterly 60.2 (1987) 237-61. “The Call of the Letter; or, the Textual Identity of Handke’s Kurzer Brief zum langen Abschied.” Knjizevna Kritika (Literary Criticism) 1 (1986) 52-62. “Dialogic Midwifery in Kleist’s Marquise von O and the Hermeneutics of Telling the Untold in Kant and Plato.” PMLA 100.2 (March, 1985) 203-19. “Polemical Rhetoric and the Dialectics of Kritik in Hegel’s Jena Essays.” Rhetoric and Philosophy 18.1 (1985) 31-57 |
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Translations Koslowski, Peter. “(De)Construction Sites of Postmodernism” (“Die Baustellen der Postmoderne--Wider die Vollendungszwang der Moderne”). Zeitgeist in Babel: The Postmodernist Controversy. Tr. John H. Smith and Jane O. Newman. Ed. Ingeborg Hoesterey. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992. Hamacher, Werner. “The Promise of Interpretation: Reflections on the Hermeneutical Imperative in Kant and Nietzsche” (“Das Versprechen der Auslegung: Überlegungen zum hermeneutischen Imperativ bei Kant und Nietzsche”). Looking After Nietzsche. Tr. John H. Smith. Ed. Laurence A. Rickels. Albany: SUNY Press, 1990. 19-48. Loos, Adolf. Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays 1897-1900 (Ins Leere gesprochen) and Contraries: Collected Essays, vol.2 (Trotzdem). Tr. John H. Smith. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982-84. Adorno, Theodor. “Functionalism Today.” Tr. John H. Smith. Oppositions: A Journal for Ideas and Criticism and Architecture 17 (1979) 31-41. Bloch, Ernst. “Formative Education, Engineering Form, Ornament” (“Bildung, Ingenieurform, Ornament”). Tr. John H. Smith. Oppositions 17(1979). 42-52. |
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| Link to this profile | http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=2510 | |
| Last updated | 11/19/2007 | |