Bennett Benjamin K. Bennett
Kenan Professor of German

Degrees

Ph.D., Columbia, 1975

Interests

Drama (history, theory, criticism), German literature of the 18th and early 19th centuries, and of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, European literature of the same periods, literary theory (especially literary historiography, theory of reading, feminism).

 
Books

Modern Drama and German Classicism:  Renaissance from Lessing to Brecht (1979), Goethe’s Theory of Poetry:  Faust and the Regeneration of Language (1986), Hugo von Hofmannsthal:  The Theaters of Consciousness (1988), Theater As Problem:  Modern Drama and Its Place in Literature (1990), Beyond Theory:  Eighteenth-Century German Literature and the Poetics of Irony (1993), Goethe as Woman:  The Undoing of Literature (2001), All Theater Is Revolutionary Theater (2005), The Dark Side of Literacy:  Literature and Learning Not to Read (forthcoming, fall 2008).  In preparation:  “Secular Millennialism:  The Trail of Aesthetics from  Baumgarten and Kant to Walt Disney and Hitler.”

 
Articles

“The Future of the Infinitive,” The Serif, 8, no. 3 (Sept. 1971), 14-19.

Bulletin of the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages, 3, no. 4 (May, 1972), 18-20.

“‘Tis Sixty Years Since,” review article on Strich, Die Mythologie in der deutschen  Literatur, in German Quarterly, 45 (1972), 684-702.

“The Smallest World Theater,” Mosaic, VII/2 (Winter, 1975), 53-66.

“Chandos and his Neighbors,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, 49 (1975), 315-331.

“The Role of Vorwitz in Hofmannsthal’s Das Salzburger Groβe Welttheater,” Symposium, 29 (1975), 13-29.

with Frank G. Ryder, “The Irony of Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea:  Its Form and Function,” PMLA, 90 (1975), 433-446.

“Idea, Reality and Play-Acting in Der Tor und der Tod,” Orbis Litterarum, 30 (1975), 262-276.

“Hans Karl’s Unmysterious Return” Essays in Literature, 2 (1975), 230-244.

“Kleist’s Puppets in Early Hofmannsthal,” Modern Language Quarterly, 37 (1976), 151-167.

“Werther and Chandos,” Modern Language Notes, 91 (1976), 552-558.

“Hofmannsthal’s Return,” Germanic Review, 51 (1976), 28-40.

“Missed Meetings in Hofmannsthal’s Der Schwierige,” Forum for Modern Language             Studies, 12 (1976), 59-64.

“Casting Out Nines:  Structure, Parody and Myth in Tonio Kröger,” Revue des Langues Vivantes, 42 (1976), 126-146.

“‘Vorspiel auf dem Theater’:  The Ironic Basis of Goethe’s Faust,” German Quarterly, 49 (1976), 438-455.

“Death and the Fools,” German Life & Letters, 30 (1976-77), 65-72.

“Interrupted Tragedy as the Structure of Goethe’s Faust,” Mosaic, XI/1 (Fall, 1977), 37-51.

“Goethe’s Egmont as a Politician,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 10 (1977), 351-366.

“Reason, Error and the Shape of History:  Lessing’s Nathan and Lessing’s God,” Lessing Yearbook, IX (1977), 60-80.

 “The Two ‘Study’ Scenes and the Pentagram in Goethe’s Faust,” Essays in Literature, 5 (1978), 223-237.

“The Idea of the Audience in Lessing’s Inexplicit Tragic Dramaturgy,” Lessing Yearbook, XI (1979), 59-68.

 “Nietzsche’s Idea of Myth:  The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics,” PMLA, 94 (1979), 420-433.

“Goethe’s Werther:  Double Perspective and the Game of Life,” German Quarterly, 53 (1980), 64-81.

“‘Ursprünge’:  The Secret Language of George’s Der siebente Ring,” Germanic Review, 55 (1980), 74-81.

“The Classical, the Romantic and the Tragic in Part Two of Goethe’s Faust,” Studies in Romanticism, 19 (1980), 529-550.

“Stefan Georges ‘Ursprünge’:  Zur Deutung des ‘Siebenten Rings,’“ CASTRVM   PEREGRINI, 31 (1982), no. 155, pp. 28-51.  (German translation of no. 33.)

 “Trinitarische Humanität:  Dichtung und Geschichte bei Schiller,” in Friedrich Schiller:  Kunst, Humanität und Politik in der späten Aufklärung:  Ein Symposium, ed. Wolfgang Wittkowski (Tübingen:  Niemeyer, 1982), pp. 164-180.

“Levels and Movements of Consciousness in Goethe’s Faust,” Theatre Journal, 34, no. l (March, 1982), 5-19.

“Strindberg and Ibsen:  Toward a Cubism of Time in Drama,” Modern Drama, 26 (1983), 262-281.

“The Generic Constant in Lessing’s Development of a Comedy of Institutions and     Alienation,” German Quarterly, 56 (1983), 231-242.

“Utopia to the Second Power:  Literary Interpretation as Social Thought,” without the title, as a review article on Hermand, Orte.  Irgendwo, in German Quarterly, 56 (1983), 106-112.

“Cinema, Theater and Opera:  Modern Drama as Ceremony,” Modern Drama, 28 (1985), 1-21.

“Prometheus and Saturn:  The Three Versions of Götz von Berlichingen,” German      Quarterly, 58 (1985), 335-47.

“Werther and Montaigne:  The Romantic Renaissance,” Goethe Yearbook, 3 (1986), 1-20.

“Structure, Parody and Myth in Tonio Kröger,” reprint of no. 20, in Harold Bloom (ed.), Thomas Mann, Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), pp. 227-240.

“Intransitive Parody and the Trap of Reading in Turn-of-the-Century German Prose,” in Fictions of Culture:  Essays in Honor of Walter H. Sokel, ed. Steven Taubeneck (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), pp. 135-167.

“Brecht’s Writing against Writing,” The Brecht Yearbook 17 (1992), pp. 164-179.

“Performance and the Exposure of Hermeneutics,” Theatre Journal, 44 (1992), pp. 431-447.

“The Politics of the Mörike Debate and Its Object,” Germanic Review, 68 (1993), 60-68.

“Bridge:  Against Nothing” (on Nietzsche, Derrida, Irigaray), in Nietzsche and the Feminine, ed. Peter J. Burgard (U. Press of Virginia: Charlottesville, 1994), pp. 289-315.

“Strindberg and Ibsen:  Toward a Cubism of Time in Drama,” in Modernism in European Drama:  Ibsen, Strindberg, Pirandello, Beckett, ed. Frederick J. Marker, Christopher Innes (Toronto, 1998), pp. 69-91.  (Reprint of no. 38.)

“Interrupted Tragedy as a Structural Principle in Faust,” in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:  Faust, A Tragedy:  Interpretive Notes, Contexts, Modern Criticism, ed. Cyrus Hamlin (New York and London, 2001), pp. 598-611.  (New version of no. 26.)

“Foreword,” to each of the three volumes of Laurence A. Rickels, Nazi Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis, 2002)

“Hofmannsthal’s Theater of Adaptation,” in Thomas A. Kovach (ed.), A Companion to the Works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Rochester, N.Y., 2002), pp. 97-115.

“Speech, Writing and Identity in the West-östlicher Divan,” in Goethe Yearbook, 12 (2004), pp. 161-83.

“It’s a Word! It’s a Claim! . . . Modernism and Related Instances of an Inherently Discredited Conceptual Type,” artUS, special issue 5/6 (Jan./Feb. 2005), 10-15.

“Attack of the Kleins,” artUS, 8 (May/June 2005), 50-51.

“The Absence of Drama in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” in Clayton Koelb and Eric Downing (eds.), German Literature of the Nineteenth Century, 1832-1899 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005), pp. 157-81.

“The Irrelevance of Aesthetics and the De-Theorizing of the Self in ‘Classical’ Weimar,” in Simon Richter (ed.), The Literature of Weimar Classicism (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2005), pp. 295-321.

“Heroes and Fleabags, and Women:  Gender and Representation in Penthesilea,” forthcoming in a collection of essays on Kleist.

“Secret Theses on Literature and Politics,” forthcoming in artUS.

 
Honors

Maxwell Lecturer, Rutgers University, April 2002; keynote speaker at the annual Dies Universitatis of the Friedrich-Schiller Universität in Jena, June 2001; President, Goethe Society of North America 1998-2001; Modern Language Association James Russell Lowell Prize, 1980, for Modern Drama and German Classicism.