Practicing progress : : the promise and limitations of enlightenment; Festschrift for John A. McCarthy / / edited by Richard E. Schade and Dieter Sevin.

• Superior document: Internationale Forschungen zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 106
• TeilnehmendeR: McCarthy, John A. 1942-2022.; Schade, Richard E.; Sevin, Dieter.
• Year of Publication: 2007
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Internationale Forschungen zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft ; 106.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (235 p.)
• Notes: Festschrift.

Practicing Progress focuses on the German Enlightenment in its dual manifestation as a cultural era and as a mode of discourse. The volume’s unifying theme is the promise and limitations of the Enlightenment, as seen from the twenty-first century. Contributors deal with figures from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries in theology, poetry and drama, economic theory, and music. Included are such powerful critics of the politics of progress as Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, and Bertolt Brecht. The volume is of particular interest to scholars concerned with the complexity of literary phenomena. A variety of interpretive approaches yield fresh insights into the still ongoing project of Enlightenment.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- Preface / Dieter Sevin -- A Word about John McCarthy: Scholar, Teacher, and Colleague / Dieter Sevin -- Introduction to Practicing Progress: The Promise and Limitations of Enlightenment / Richard E. Schade -- Bestimmung(en) des Menschen. Zu einem Zentralthema des Aufklärungsdiskurses und einigen seiner Facetten im Umkreis Lessings / Wolfgang Albrecht -- From Evil Eye to Poetic Eye: Witch Beliefs and Physiognomy in the Age of Enlightenment / Susanne Kord -- Enlightenment According to Don Alfonso: Perilous Progress in Mozart’s Così fan tutte / Laurie Johnson -- Casanova’s Radical Enlightenment / Carl Niekerk -- Economic Value-Theory and Literary Culture in Late-Eighteenth Century Germany: The Debate over Physiocracy / Richard T. Gray -- The Errors of Our Ways: The Relation of Literature to Culture in Goethe’s Faust / Simon Richter -- “Von London und Hannover verlassen”: Germans in America in the Eighteenth Century / Thomas P. Saine -- Laocoon, Nathan the Wise, and the Contexts of Their Critical Reception in Nineteenth-Century American Reviews / Herbert Rowland -- Dialectic of the Biological Enlightenment: Nietzsche, Degeneration, and Eugenics / Robert C. Holub -- Humanity and Its Limits: Hannah Arendt Reads Lessing / Liliane Weissberg -- The Use Value of Brecht’s Enlightenment: Revisiting the 1960's in Germany / Frank Trommler -- Advancing Enlightenment Toward Ultimate Victory: A Recent View of Friedrich Nicolai / Horst S. Daemmrich -- John McCarthy’s Publications.