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German Romanticism Renewed

In German studies as well as in literary and culture studies more generally, a reengagement with and re-exploration of Romanticism and its aesthetic, literary, philosophical, and political heirs is under way. Essay collections including The Relevance of Romanticism: Essays on German Romantic Philosophy (ed. Dalia Nassar, 2014), Constructions of German Romanticism (ed. Mattias Pirholt, 2011), and The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism (ed. Nicholas Saul, 2009) are only a few of many recent contributions. Romanticism seems to have rebounded from criticism that it idealizes introversion, promotes disengagement with material reality, and fails to acknowledge social conflict and power relations. The ability of Romantic thought and art to create a meaningful interplay of philosophy and literature arguably remains unparalleled. And, to borrow Richard Eldridge’s phrases, Romanticism represents “the effort to envision human possibilities of the achievement of value” more strongly and self-consciously than Enlightenment thought did before it, and offers a compelling vision of the human as “both a free, noumenal agent and an embodied, natural being” (11, 36), even after the catastrophes of twentieth-century history and the challenges of theory after the linguistic turn. A return to Romanticism need not be a nostalgic attempt to recover a more distant and implicitly better past but rather can offer ways to integrate insights from the most trenchant contemporary thought with a sober reassessment of the virtues and crimes of the desirous, reasonable, finite, striving post-Enlightened subject. These propositions were discussed in depth at the German Studies Association conference in Denver in October 2013, in the course of a seminar titled “Recycling Romanticism.” Participants explored the movement’s permutations from the late eighteenth century to the present. We also considered what it means to “recycle” old ideas, as well as what motivates attempts to mine the present for traces of the past. We investigated the ways in which the conceptual reciprocities and emphasis on the subjective will that marked German Romanticism in particular are compatible with aspects of materialism. Several seminar participants have contributed essays to this issue of Seminar, which represents an extension and deepening of the conference discussions. Ideally, the “symphilosophical” connection between the seminar and this journal issue will encourage continued critical engagement with German Romanticism. Literary scholars have agreed that groups and individuals largely (but not exclusively) concentrated in Jena and Heidelberg produced the main philosophical