Thomas Pfau - Contact Info:
Education:
- Ph.D. State University of New York at Buffalo, 1989
- M.A. University of California at Irvine, 1985
- BA University of Constance, Germany, 1982
- Specialties:
-
19th Century Literature
Critical Theory
Literary History & Criticism
- Research Interests:
A native of Germany, Thomas Pfau began his academic career in 1980 as a student of History and Literature at the University of Constance. In 1982, he came to the U.S. where, at UC-Irvine, he joined the Graduate Program in Comparative Literature and Theory. In 1985, he continued his studies in the Comparative Literature Program at SUNY-Buffalo where he received his Ph.D. in 1989 with a dissertation on self-consciousness in Romantic poetry and theory (Wordsworth, Shelley, et al.). Since then, his main interests have broadened to include a large array of Romantic writers -philosophical, literary, historical- in England and Germany. His published work has explored such questions as paranoia as an mediation of historically induced anxiety (in Blake, Godwin and the 1794 Treason Trials); moral speech as performance (in Hegel and J. L. Austin); problems of historicism in contemporary Romantic Studies and the work of Work of Walter Benjamin; the Romantic conception of textual interpretation (in Schleiermacher). Besides translating and editing two volumes of theoretical writings by Hölderlin and Schelling, he also edited two essay collections on English Romanticism . Following his 1997 book, Wordsworth's Profession (Stanford UP), he has just completed a study of English and German Romanticism, entitled Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1794-1840.
- Curriculum Vitae
- Current Ph.D. Students
(Former Students)
- Andrew Burkett
- Allison Dushane
- Recent Publications
(More Publications)
- "“The Philosophy of Shipwreck: Gnosticism, Skepticism, and Coleridge’s Catastrophic Modernity.”." MLN - Comparative Literature Issue 122.4
(Winter, 2007)
- Review of 1. George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago: U of Chicago Press). European Romantic Review 18.3
(Spring, 2007): 439-44.
- "Of Ends and Endings: Teleological and Variational Models of Romantic Narrative." European Romantic Review 18.2
(Spring, 2007): 231-41.
- The Wordsworthian Enlightenment, ed. Helen R. Elam & Frances Ferguson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005). Romantic Circles
(2007). [available here]
- Helen Elam and Frances Ferguson. 1. The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading. Romantic Praxis
(2007). (forthcoming)
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