Arthur C. T. Strum

Assistant Professor of German Studies

Building 260, Room 206
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2030
Phone: 650 723 0397
Fax: 650 725 8421
Email: strum@stanford.edu

Website: http://www.stanford.edu/~strum/

Interests

One of the great potentials of the modern university is that is could protect, preserve, or develop traditions, texts, and habits of thought which may otherwise have no place in a present bent on erasing not just all pasts but the future as well. Very often, apparently useless texts or traditions or habits of thought turn out to have great cultural or political relevance -- but only rarely when they are interpreted or appropriated for predominantly historical-scholarly reasons. My work as a scholar, teacher and writer is an experiment to discover pedagogical and scholarly means by which the useful uselessness of humanistic study can be uncovered.
One of my current projects -- The Stanford Workshops in Humanities (http://dlclstudios.stanford.edu/) -- proposes both to expand the reach of the DLCL and its faculty, by making the talents and training of these scholars in languages and literatures available to new audiences (and therefore also to the challenges these new audiences present), and at the same time to explore new outcomes and products which might issue from intensive humanistic study in literatures and languages.

One of my guiding interests as a scholar is in the relation between philosophy and politics, and between art and politics. A current book project, "The Revolution of 1781: Kant's Philosophical Politics," explores these themes in suggesting how Kant's attempt to found a new philosophical culture both anticipates crucial aspects of a founding event of political modernity -- the French Revolutions of 1789-94 -- while also establishing its own real and possible precedents for the culture of modernity. Another book project, "Antinomies of Bourgeois Life," explores the contradictory imperatives of "principle" and "life" in the identity of the bourgeois since the French Revolution. I also work on the theory and history of the public sphere, on Critical Theory, on the filmmaker and writer Alexander Kluge, and on the history and function of university education.

Education

1997 Ph.D., Cornell University
1988 A.B., Stanford University

Current Courses

Win GERLIT 122N. Stanford Introductory Seminar: Virtue and Terror: Kant, Rousseau, and the French Revolution
Win GERLIT 131A. The Young Goethe
Spr GERGEN 09A. Myth and Modernity (Enroll in IHUM 09A)
Spr GERGEN 272. The Politics of the Humanities

Previous Courses

Antinomies of Bourgeois Life
Alexander Kluge
Culture of Enlightenment
Learning to Think Hegelian: Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit
Morality in the Age of Revolutions
Kant's Critique of Judgment
Deutsche Geistesgeschichte II: 10th Century German Thought
The Culture of Enlightenment (Introduction to the Literature of the German Enlightenment)
Myth and Modernity:
* Spr 120N Stanford Introductory Seminar: Leaving Immaturity Behund: Coming of Age in the 18th Century
* Spr 234D The Buildingsroman II: The Poeticization of the World?

Selected publications

Collaborative book

Öffentlichkeit: Geschichte eines kritischen Begriffs, ed. Peter U. Hohendahl (J. B. Metzler Verlag: Stuttgart 2000) [contributed the last of the book's four chapters, "Von der Moderne zur Postmoderne: Öffentlichkeit und Publikum von 1960-1999, pp. 92-123]; also contributed the brief essay "öffentlich/Publikum: eine Bibliographie." (pp. 125-129); and a bibliography of the concepts "Öffentlichkeit and Public Sphere" (pp. 130-178)

Essays

"Public Space, Language and Tone in Kant's Philosophical Republic," Akten des IV. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, volume IV. (de Gruyter 2001), 257-265.

"What Enlightenment Is," New German Critique, no. 79. Special Issue on 18th Century Literature and Thought. Winter 2000: 106-136.

"German Studies and the Crisis of Humanistic Work" German Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 1 Winter 2000: 45-66.

Current projects

A current book project, "The Revolution of 1781: Kant's Philosophical Politics," explores these themes in suggesting how Kant's attempt to found a new philosophical culture both anticipates crucial aspects of a founding event of political modernity--the French Revolutions of 1789-94--and can be understood as establishing its own precedents for the culture of modernity. Another book project, "The Form of Enlightenment," explores how the development of certain conceptions of knowledge and enlightenment in the late 18th century also require their exponents to invent new philosophical and aesthetic forms to carry these conceptions.

Professional activities

Undergraduate Advisor
Corollary experiment faculty, Stanford Learning Laboratory