Prof. Dr. Dirk von Petersdorff
Dirk von Petersdorff studied the history of German literature and history at Kiel University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1995. In 2003 he completed his postdoctoral degree (Habilitation) at Saarland University on the topic “Centrifugal Forces of Modernity: On Constituting the Ego in Twentieth-Century Poetry.” Since 2008 he has been a tenured professor for modern German literature at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. He was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. In the 2013–14 Winter Semester he held Tübingen University’s poetics lectureship together with Hans Magnus Enzensberger.
Current research project
Monograph on Goethe’s poetry (cf. the related essay below)
Research focus
Literature and social modernization (eighteenth through twentieth century)
Literature and literary theory of Romanticism
Thyssen project “The Meeting of the Romantics in Jena (November 11 - 14/15, 1799): Documentation and Analysis” ? Project description
Select publications
Monographs
Literaturgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Von 1945 bis zur Gegenwart [Literary History of the Federal Republic of Germany: From 1945 to the Present], Munich 2011.
Geschichte der deutschen Lyrik [History of German Poetry], Munich 2008.
Fliehkräfte der Moderne. Zur Ich-Konstitution in der Lyrik des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts [Centrifugal Forces of Modernity: On Constituting the Ego in Twentieth-Century Poetry], Tübingen 2005.
Mysterienrede. Zum Selbstverständnis romantischer Intellektueller [The Mysteries Speech: On the Self-Understanding of Romantic Intellectuals], Tübingen 1996.
As an editor
Hans Magnus Enzensberger und die Ideengeschichte der Bundesrepublik. Mit einem Essay von Lars Gustafsson [Hans Magnus Enzensberger and the History of Ideas of the Federal Republic: With an Essay by Lars Gustafsson], Heidelberg 2010.
(with Bernd Auerochs) Einheit der Romantik? Zur Transformation frühromantischer Konzepte im 19. Jahrhundert [Unity among the Romantics? On the Transformation of Early Romantic Concepts in the Nineteenth Century], Paderborn 2009.
Essays
Der Apfelmann aus Delmenhorst. Gegenwartsdiagnostik in der deutschen Popmusik, in: Merkur. Deutsche Zeitschrift für europäisches Denken 62 (February 2008), pp. 123-131.
Transgressiv und transitorisch. Romantische Prinzipien der Strukturierung von Bildlichkeit (Wackenroder, Novalis, Kugler), in: Benjamin Specht (ed.): Epoche und Metapher. Systematik und Geschichte Kultureller Bildlichkeit, Berlin/Boston 2014, pp. 188-201.
Was Götter und Geister noch zu sagen haben. Überlegungen zur Funktion religiöser Semantik in Goethes Lyrik, in: Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts 2014, pp. 24-47.