Cosmos and Colonialism

Alexander von Humboldt in Cultural Criticism
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-0-85745-266-5
Verlag: Berghahn Books

Buch, Englisch, 364 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 683 g

Alexander von Humboldt explored the Spanish Empire on the verge of its collapse (1799–1804). He is the most significant German travel writer and the most important mediator between Europe and the Americas of the nineteenth century. His works integrated knowledge from two dozen domains. Today, he is at the center of debates on imperial discourse, postcolonialism, and globalization. This collection of fifty essays brings together a range of responses, many presented here for the first time in English. Authors from Schiller, Chateaubriand, Sarmiento, and Nietzsche, to Robert Musil, Kurt Tucholsky, Ernst Bloch, and Alejo Carpentier paint the historical background. Essays by contemporary travel writers and recent critics outline the current controversies on Humboldt. The source materials collected here will be indispensable to scholars of German, French, and Latin and North American literature as well as cultural and postcolonial studies, history, art history, and the history of science.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Clark, Rex

Lubrich, Oliver

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Geschichte: Expeditionen & Entdeckungen
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Postkoloniale Geschichte, Nationale Befreiung und Unabhängigkeit
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kolonialgeschichte, Geschichte des Imperialismus

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Editorial method

Introduction: Analyzing Humboldt

Chapter 1. Letter to Christian Gottfried Körner 1797

Friedrich Schiller

Chapter 2. Thoughts on the Principal Events of the French Revolution 1817

Germaine de Staël

Chapter 3. On Monsieur de Humboldt’s Voyage 1820

François-René Chateaubriand

Chapter 4. Conversations with Goethe 1827

Johann Peter Eckermann

Chapter 5. Thoughts on Modern Literature 1840

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Chapter 6. Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism 1845

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento

Chapter 7. Aesthetics or The Science of Beauty 1847

Friedrich Theodor Vischer

Chapter 8. The Napoleon of Science 1850

Henry Theodore Tuckerman

Chapter 9. Aesthetics of the Ugly 1853

Karl Rosenkranz

Chapter 10. Eulogy 1859

Louis Agassiz

Chapter 11. Letter to Ludmilla Assing 1860

Gottfried Keller

Chapter 12. The Culture of the Renaissance in Italy 1860

Jacob Burckhardt

Chapter 13. Walking 1862

Henry David Thoreau

Chapter 14. The True Character of Humboldt 1869

Karl Heinzen

Chapter 15. The Descent of Man 1871

Charles Darwin

Chapter 16. Honoré de Balzac 1875

Henry James

Chapter 17. The Shortcomings of the Style 1877

Friedrich Nietzsche

Chapter 18. Rebellion in the Backland 1902

Euclides da Cunha

Chapter 19. Vision of Anáhuac (1519) 1915

Alfonso Reyes

Chapter 20. The Dry Putsch 1922

Kurt Tucholsky

Chapter 21. In the Steps of Humboldt 1923

José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Chapter 22. The German as a Human Symptom 1923

Robert Musil

Chapter 23. Result of Perspectives 1930

Gottfried Benn

Chapter 24. Introduction to the “Political Essay on the Island of Cuba” 1930

Fernando Ortiz

Chapter 25. Commemoration of Alexander von Humboldt 1934

Karl Blasche

Chapter 26. Cuban Counterpoint. Tobacco and Sugar 1940

Fernando Ortiz

Chapter 27. Humboldt, Political and Private 1942

Egon Erwin Kisch

Chapter 28. The Scientific Conquest 1942

Egon Erwin Kisch

Chapter 29. The Dispute of the New World 1955

Antonello Gerbi

Chapter 30. Memory of Humboldt 1958

José Lezama Lima

Chapter 31. The Principle of Hope 1959

Ernst Bloch

Chapter 32. The Invention of America 1961

Edmundo O’Gorman

Chapter 33. Preliminary Study to the “Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain” 1965

Juan A. Ortega y Medina

Chapter 34. The City of Columns 1970

Alejo Carpentier

Chapter 35. Humboldt and the Rehabilitation of a Continent 1970

Hugo Loetscher

Chapter 36. LSD: My Problem Child 1979

Albert Hofmann

Chapter 37. The Memory of Humboldt Lives in the Peoples’ Struggle 1981

Erich Honecker

Chapter 38. A Book on Nature as a Book of Nature 1981

Hans Blumenberg

Chapter 39. Message from the Horsehead 1981

Peter Schneider

Chapter 40. Blackholes of Historiography 1989

Peter Hacks

Chapter 41. No One Wanders under Palm Trees Unpunished. Goethe and Humboldt 1991

Hans Christoph Buch

Chapter 42. Alexander von Humboldt and the Reinvention of America 1992

Mary Louise Pratt

Chapter 43. 'The Second Columbus?’ 1995

Eoin Bourke

Chapter 44. The German Columbus 1997

Susanne Zantop

Chapter 45. The Graves of the Humboldts 1998

Hans Blumenberg

Chapter 46. Like Bronze Statues of Antiquity 2000

Oliver Lubrich

Chapter 47. Walking Backward to the Future 2000

Benigno Trigo

Chapter 48. Concepts of Culture on the Orinoco 2002

Rex Clark

Chapter 49. The Art of Travel 2002

Alain de Botton

Chapter 50.  Opening of the Humboldt Exhibit in Madrid 2005

Kerstin Müller

Source Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Clark, Rex
Rex Clark is a Lecturer in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. He studied at the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, researching the history of travel guides and travel discourse in the eighteenth century and focusing on Friedrich Nicolai, Georg Forster, and Alexander von Humboldt. He has published articles on digital media, postcolonial travel theory, and the reception of Alexander von Humboldt.

Lubrich, Oliver
Oliver Lubrich is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Universität Bern in Switzerland. He is the author of Shakespeare's Self-Deconstruction (2001) and Post-Colonial Poetics (2004, 2009) and the editor of Travels in the Reich, 1933-1945 (2010). He has edited or co-edited Alexander von Humboldt's Central Asia (2009), Kosmos (2004), and the first German version of Vues des Cordillères (2004), the Chimborazo Diary (2006) as well as the ethnographic and political essays (2009, 2010).

Rex Clark is a Lecturer in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. He studied at the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, researching the history of travel guides and travel discourse in the eighteenth century and focusing on Friedrich Nicolai, Georg Forster, and Alexander von Humboldt. He has published articles on digital media, postcolonial travel theory, and the reception of Alexander von Humboldt.