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Curriculum Study Abroad German House Resources People Placement After Macalester
Faculty Home Brigetta Abel Rachael Huener Kiarina Kordela David Martyn Gisela Peters Linda Schulte-Sasse Native Speaker 2009 Marcus Heim Native Speaker 2009 Benjamin Stoltenburg Martha Davis |
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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 |
David Martyn|
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