Representation and its discontents

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Representation and Its Discontents provides a concise, elegantly argued introduction to the problem of representation in the critical discourse of German Romanticism. Azade Seyhan sketches the chaotic political and intellectual landscape confronting the late eighteenth-century thinkers in the aftermath of German Idealism and locates in their work the implications of the sociopolitical, cultural, and moral upheaval accompanying the French Revolution. She explores how. Kant, Fichte, Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel, and Novalis offered new paradigms of understanding, challenging the traditional claims and conceptualizations of philosophical and literary representation and embarking on a theoretical quest to redefine the objectives of criticism. Seyhan succeeds in showing how this challenge led not only to a reconceptualization of the conditions and limits of philosophy but also to a revolutionary shift in the understanding and writing of. Literature and history now associated with the work of Nietzsche and contemporary critics such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Emphasizing the Romantic parentage of current debates, Seyhan provides a remarkably clear guide to a formative moment of modern criticism that will interest specialists in German and European literature, intellectual history, cultural studies, and philosophy.