Philosophy and Literature

As a six-week introduction to this topic, our class will focus on the overlap between literature and philosophy during the Enlightenment and Romantic eras as well as their legacies in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Two central themes that will guide our analyses will be aesthetics and language. We will not only work on improving our knowledge of the texts, authors and periods, but we will also reflect on the parallels and differences between philosophical and literary approaches. Furthermore, the course seeks to place these concepts in a comparative context in the history of ideas.