John A. McCarthy

Eugene Farrell

Anthony McFeely

National House Building Guarantee Company

House Building Manual

HomeBond (Firm)

This book is about intersections among science, philosophy, and literature. It bridges the gap between the traditional “cultures” of science and the humanities by constituting an area of interaction that some have called a “third culture.” By asking questions about three disciplines rather than about just two, as is customary in research, this inquiry breaks new ground and resists easy categorization. It seeks to answer the following questions: What impact has the remapping of reality in scientific terms since the Copernican Revolution through thermodynamics, relativity theory, and quantum mechanics had on the way writers and thinkers conceptualized the place of human culture within the total economy of existence? What influence, on the other hand, have writers and philosophers had on the doing of science and on scientific paradigms of the world? Thirdly, where does humankind fit into the total picture with its uniquely moral nature? In other words, rather than privileging one discipline over another, this study seeks to uncover a common ground for science, ethics, and literary creativity. Throughout this inquiry certain nodal points emerge to bond the argument cogently together and create new meaning. These anchor points are the notion of movement inherent in all forms of existence, the changing concepts of evil in the altered spaces of reality, and the creative impulse critical to the literary work of art as well as to the expanding universe. This ambitious undertaking is unified through its use of phenomena typical of chaos and complexity theory as so many leitmotifs. While they first emerged to explain natural phenomena at the quantum and cosmic levels, chaos and complexity are equally apt for explaining moral and aesthetic events. Hence, the title “Remapping Reality” extends to the reconfigurations of the three main spheres of human interaction: the physical, the ethical, and the aesthetic or creative.

Chaos and Creativity in Science and Literature (Goethe – Nietzsche – Grass)

Remapping Reality

Thomas Koebner

Walter Grûnzweig

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the shifting of American foreign policy away from "old" Europe, long-established patterns of interaction between Germany and the U.S. have come under review. Although seemingly disconnected from the cultural and intellectual world, political developments were not without their influence on the humanities and their curricula during the past century. In retrospect, we can speak of the many different roles Germany has played in American eyes. The Many Faces of Germany seeks to acknowledge the importance of those incarnations for the study of German culture and history on both sides of the Atlantic. One of the major questions raised by the contributors is whether the transformations in the transatlantic dynamics and in the importance of Germany for the U.S. have had a major influence on the study of things German in the U.S. internally. The volume gathers together leading voices of the older and younger generations of social historians, literary scholars, film critics, and cultural historians.

The Many Faces of Germany

Richard E. Schade

Lessing Yearbook 2000

Crossing Boundaries focuses on the intellectual and social factors that led to the emergence and first flowering of the German essay. John McCarthy challenges traditional ways of thinking about literature by concentrating on the impact of Enlightenment philosophy, rhetoric, genre theory, and literary life on the evolution of essayistic writing in German. Taking issue with the commonly held view that the German essay did not evolve until after 1750—and then only under the influence of French and British models—McCarthy argues that Enlightenment skepticism and the social ideas of the galant homme spawned an early native form. Varieties of that form, a kind of writing the author terms "essayism," were pervasive, extending into a variety of genres in the hands of writers such as Leibniz, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, and Schlegel. He combines in-­depth analyses of representative essays with unique adaptations of recent developments in literary theory, intellectual history, literary history, and social history. McCarthy's argument is centrally concerned with the critical reexamination of the categories of knowledge and of the means of disseminating information that characterized eighteenth-century thought. The essay, an experimental form that crosses boundaries of discipline and genre, is derived from this new emphasis and is the clearest reflection of the dialectic interplay among thinking, writing, and reading. It is also, as such, the genre or mode most closely related to Enlightenment philosophy itself.

Towards a Theory and History of Essay Writing in German, 1680-1815

Crossing Boundaries

John A. McCarthy

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