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David Martyn
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David Martyn (B.A. Yale Univ., Ph.D. Cornell Univ.) came to the department
in 2003 from the Department of German at the University of Bonn, where
he taught literature and literary theory for five years. His major interests
are 18th- and early 19th-century German literature and philosophy, literary
and cultural theory, and constructions of linguistic and cultural identity
in Germany from the late 18th century to the present. His first book
was a study of Immanuel Kant and the Marquis de Sade (Sublime
Failures: The Ethics of Kant and Sade, Wayne State University
Press, 2003). Drawing on the surprising homology between Kantian ethics
and Sadian libertinism that authors such as Horkheimer and Adorno or
Jacques Lacan have pointed out, the book attempts to elaborate a non-subjective
theory of agency centered on the notion of “failure” as
it figures in Kant’s theory of the sublime. Martyn has also worked
on theories of language and hermeneutics around 1800, especially as
they relate to questions of cultural and religious identity. This is
an interest he has pursued in his recently published critical edition
of Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem,
the most important work on Judaism published in Germany in the 18th
century; in articles on language and nationalism in J.G. Fichte; and
in a forthcoming article on the “violence of understanding”
in Kleist and Schleiermacher. He is currently writing a book on language
and identity that concerns literature written in German by authors for
whom German is a ‘second’ or ‘foreign’ language,
including Salomon Maimon, Adelbert von Chamisso, Elias Canetti, and
the contemporary “germanophone” authors Salim Alafenisch
and Yoko Tawada.
At Macalester, Martyn teaches courses in German language,
German literature and culture from the 18th century to the present, and
in philosophy and critical theory. Recent course titles include “The Comical
Effects of Kleist and Kafka” and “Translingual Interventions: Migration
and Cultural Identity in Contemporary Germany.”
Office:
211B Humanities
Phone: 651-696-6547
email: martyn@macalester.edu
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