Silvio Vietta

Last updated
Silvio Vietta Silvio Vietta.jpg
Silvio Vietta

Silvio Vietta (born 7 August 1941, in Berlin) is a German scholar and professor emeritus of the University of Hildesheim. His work has concerned itself principally with German literature, philosophy and European cultural history. His main areas of research are the literatures of Expressionism and Romanticism, and Literary Modernity. He has also published on Martin Heidegger, with whom he had personal contact while a student, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. His recent research has been in European cultural history, in particular the history of rationality.

Contents

Biography

Silvio Vietta is the son of the writer Egon Vietta and Dorothea, born Feldhaus. He studied German Literature, Philosophy, English Literature and Education (1962–68) and received his PhD from the University of Würzburg in 1970 for a thesis on Language and the Reflection on Language in Modern Poetry. Vietta began his academic career as a lecturer in German at Elmira College, Elmira NY, and later taught at the German universities of Heidelberg, Tübingen, Mannheim and Hildesheim. In 1981 he finished his habilitation (German postdoctoral qualification) on Modern Rationality and Literary Criticism at the University of Mannheim. In 2006 he was a visiting professor at the University of Moscow (RGGU), in 2007 and 2008-09 visiting professor at the University of Sassari (Italy) and in 2012 visiting professor at the University of Campinas (Brazil). Vietta is a member of the advisory board of Angermion, the Yearbook of Anglo-German Literary Criticism (London), a member of AVUR (Agenzia nazionale valutazione ricerca Universitaria), Italy, and a member of the International German Society.

In 2006, he received the Friedrich Nietzsche Prize of the State of Saxony-Anhalt. [1]

Theory

Vietta has specialized in the macro-theory of the periods of Expressionism, Romanticism and Modernity, and in recent years has become one of the pioneers of 'Europeism' as a field of intercultural European Studies. In 2012 he published Texte zur Poetik (Texts on Poetics), a historical documentation of the basic European texts on poetics from Plato and Aristotle to Postmodernism and cybernetic poetics. His recent work is a long-term study of the history of rationality: Rationalität. Eine Weltgeschichte. Europäische Kulturgeschichte und die Globalisierung (Rationality: A History of the World - European Cultural History and Globalization, 2012), in which he shows how the European concept and practice of rationality has explored and conquered the world and led to the present world civilization. Vietta speaks of the "empire of rationality" as a world-governing power that includes different irrational effects.

Publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hans-Georg Gadamer</span> German philosopher (1900–2002)

Hans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus, Truth and Method, on hermeneutics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jürgen Habermas</span> German social theorist and philosopher (born 1929)

Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher and social theorist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. His work addresses communicative rationality and the public sphere.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Literary criticism</span> Study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature

Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of literature's goals and methods. Though the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">German philosophy</span> Specialty in philosophy, focused on German language origin

German philosophy, meaning philosophy in the German language or philosophy by German people, in its diversity, is fundamental for both the analytic and continental traditions. It covers figures such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, and the Frankfurt School, who now count among the most famous and studied philosophers of all time. They are central to major philosophical movements such as rationalism, German idealism, Romanticism, dialectical materialism, existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, logical positivism, and critical theory. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is often also included in surveys of German philosophy due to his extensive engagement with German thinkers.

The Counter-Enlightenment refers to a loose collection of intellectual stances that arose during the European Enlightenment in opposition to its mainstream attitudes and ideals. The Counter-Enlightenment is generally seen to have continued from the 18th century into the early 19th century, especially with the rise of Romanticism. Its thinkers did not necessarily agree to a set of counter-doctrines but instead each challenged specific elements of Enlightenment thinking, such as the belief in progress, the rationality of all humans, liberal democracy, and the increasing secularisation of society.

William Vaios Spanos was a Heideggerian literary critic. Spanos was a Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York; he was a founder and editor of the critical journal boundary 2. His work draws heavily on the philosophical legacy of Martin Heidegger, and while it does show the influence of the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, Spanos's vocabulary and concepts remain closer to Heidegger's Destruktion ("destruction") of metaphysics than to its philosophical successors.

This is an alphabetical index of articles about aesthetics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gianni Vattimo</span> Italian philosopher and politician

Gianteresio Vattimo is an Italian philosopher and politician.

Gottfried Boehm is a German art historian and philosopher.

Joel Black is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. Black has written extensively on subfields of literature and film studies areas such as romanticism, postmodernism, philosophy and history of science, and cultural studies. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture (1991) and The Reality Effect: Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative (2002).

<i>The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity</i> 1985 book by Jürgen Habermas

The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures is a 1985 book by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, in which the author reconstructs and deals in depth with a number of philosophical approaches to the critique of modern reason and the Enlightenment "project" since Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche, including the work of 20th century philosophers Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Cornelius Castoriadis and Niklas Luhmann. The work is regarded as an important contribution to Frankfurt School critical theory. It has been characterized as a critical evaluation of the concept of world disclosure in modern philosophy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rüdiger Safranski</span> German philosopher

Rüdiger Safranski is a German philosopher and author.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nikolas Kompridis</span> Canadian philosopher

Nikolas Kompridis is a Canadian philosopher and political theorist. His major published work addresses the direction and orientation of Frankfurt School critical theory; the legacy of philosophical romanticism; and the aesthetic dimension(s) of politics. His writing touches on a variety of issues in social and political thought, aesthetics, and the philosophy of culture, often in terms of re-worked concepts of receptivity and world disclosure—a paradigm he calls "reflective disclosure".

This is a list of articles in continental philosophy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christoph Bode</span>

Christoph Bode is a literary scholar. His fields are British and American literature, comparative literature, literary theory, narratology, and travel writing. He is full professor and chair of Modern English literature in the Department of English and American Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Since 2009, Bode has been a reviewer and occasional columnist for Times Higher Education.

Andrew S. Bowie is Professor of Philosophy and German at Royal Holloway, University of London and Founding Director of the Humanities and Arts Research Centre (HARC).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kurt Mueller-Vollmer</span> German-American philosopher and academic

Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, born in Hamburg, Germany, was an American philosopher and professor of German Studies and Humanities at Stanford University. Mueller-Vollmer studied in Germany, France, Spain and the United States. He held a master's degree in American Studies from Brown University, and a doctorate in German Studies and Humanities from Stanford University, where he taught for over 40 years. His major publications concentrate in the areas of Literary Criticism, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Romantic and Comparative Literature, language theory, cultural transfer and translation studies. Mueller-Vollmer made noteworthy scholarly contributions elucidating the theoretical and empirical linguistic work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, including the discovery of numerous manuscripts previously thought lost or otherwise unknown containing Humboldt's empirical studies of numerous languages from around the world.

Norbert Miller is a German scholar of literature and art. He was professor of literary studies at the Technische Universität Berlin from 1973 and retired in 2006.

Harro Müller is a German literary scholar, Emeritus Professor of Germanic languages at Columbia University, a former Chair of the German department at Columbia (1996-1999), and a former executive editor of The Germanic Review (1996-2002).

References

  1. "Kultusminister Olbertz verleiht Nietzsche-Preis des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt 2006 an Silvio Vietta" (in German). bildungsklick.de. 25 August 2006. Retrieved 28 February 2012.