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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749-1832)
German writer
 6 other titles

Legenda: Oxford, August 2013  
ISBN: 978-1-907975-61-5

This book addresses three key areas of intellectual enquiry: literary criticism, cultural critique, and philosophical theology. Once closely related, especially in the Catholic tradition, they often appear to be separate and unconnected domains in the modern university. The work of Nicholas Boyle is one of the most significant recent attempts to reconnect them. Responding to that initiative, The Present Word challenges this fragmentation of knowledge.

Several of the essays reflect a major change of emphasis in literary studies over the last two decades: the reconnection of an idea of literary criticism closely related to the experience of reading, and the wider societal and political concerns addressed by Cultural Studies. Contributors also debate, from both perspectives, whether theological concepts can illuminate the secular culture in which literature is written and read.

John Walker is Senior Lecturer in German at Birkbeck College, London, where he served as Head of the School of Languages, Linguistics and Culture from 2006-2009.

With the contributions:

John Walker — Introduction
Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly — Sacred and Secular Scriptures: Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg and the Poetry of Faith
Hans-Jurgen Schings — Faust and the Third Day of Creation
Martin Swales — The Human Epiphany: Reflections on Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris and Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale
John McCarthy — The Missing Tree Trunk: Sleeping Venus and Faust’s Salvation
T. J. Reed — Goethe as Secular Icon
Ritchie Robertson — Goethe and Machiavelli
Roger Paulin — A Poem by A. W. Schlegel
Charlotte Lee — Mignon as the Embodiment of the Secret
Regina Sachers — Goethe and Morike
Ian Cooper — ‘Short of History’: Les Murray and the Communion of Saints
Barry Nisbet — Some Reflections on the Philosophy of History
Karl Ameriks — Kant, Imagination and the Tragic Turn
Paul Connerton — Three Types of Forgetting
Mark Ogden — Christian Humanism and Higher Education
Eamon Duffy — Seamus Heaney and Catholicism
Charles Gordon — Nicholas Boyle and Seyyed Hossein Nasr on Textual Reading
Christoph Jamme — Enlightened Mythology: Thomas Mann and Myth
John Walker — Goethe’s Faust, Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and the Site of Literature
Nicholas Boyle — Postscript