Alexander Mathäs

Alexander Mathäs is Professor of German at the University of Oregon and author of Narcissism and Paranoia in the Age of Goethe

(University of Delaware Press, 2008) and Der Kalte Krieg in der deutschen Literaturkritik: Der Fall Martin Walser (Lang, 1992). His teaching and research address questions about the self, subjectivity, and artistic creativity in 18th-20th century German literature and thought. He has published articles on concepts of identity, gender, and memory in the works of eighteenth and twentieth-century authors. He is currently editing a collection of essays that explore the centrality of self-reflection for the outpouring of creativity in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century German literature, philosophy, and aesthetics. The volume, entitled The Self as Muse: Narcissism and Creativity in the German Imagination 1750-1850, is scheduled to appear in 2014 with Bucknell University Press. He is also working on a monograph that focuses on the ways in which eighteenth-century writers engaged with scientific and philosophical ideas about the human body, mind, and soul. It explores how the eighteenth-century literary imagination intersected with anthropological and psychological concepts and continues to inform current ideas of what it means to be human.

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