THE 'CLASSICS' / The German literature (according to Max Kommerell)

When the well-known philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in the Nineties, published, under the title The poet and the unspeakable, a collection of essays on the German literature by Max Kommerell (1902-1944), he called it "the greatest German critic of the twentieth century after Benjamin and perhaps the last great personality of Germany between the two wars that remains to be discovered ". From then on, the interest in this "personality", this multi-faceted intellectual, and for his fascinating and enigmatic literary criticism between science and poetry, grew more and more, and actually stands at the center of interest of experts (and not just experts of German literature). What was Kommerell: a philologist? A psychologist? An anthropologist? And his work: an aesthetic philology? A psychology of power? An anthropology of art?

A peculiar characteristic of Kommerell's critique lies in the fact, repeatedly observed and mentioned (by Agamben and others) - that he "has never expressed himself on his contemporaries", in his curious "fixation" on "classics" (of German but also universal literature), on Goethe and Schiller, Hölderlin and Kleist, Jean Paul and Lessing etc . This might be eloquent about the intentions of his critical project; it is, however, an excellent opportunity to engage again with some of the absolute protagonists of German literature and to reread some of their outstanding works. The course will try to 'discover' Kommerell together with these 'classics', comparing his reading (extravagant, yes, but also very convincing) of Goethe's Faust, of Schiller's Wallenstein; of the dramatic work of Kleist and of the poetic work of Hölderlin with those more conventional and generally accepted.