With the visit of Alice Kuzniar (Professor of German, University of North Carolina), the Institute began its turn to a more direct focus on its second theme, the art and literature of the period.  Kuzniar has supplemented her close literary analyses of the political and future-oriented structures of the works of writers such as Hölderlin and Novalis (Delayed Endings: Nonclosure in Novalis and Hölderlin) with more recent studies of German landscape painting and Early Romantic conceptions of gender. She has argued forcefully (in Outing Goethe & His Age) that a stress on alternative sexual orientations was central to the artists of the period. Her presentations were concerned with 1) C. D. Friedrich and melancholy, and 2) Novalis's notion of a continuum between the animal and human worlds (and consciousness) and the notion of metamorphizing into an animal.

Nature, Art, and Politics after Kant / Colorado State University / Fort Collins, CO 80521 
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