publications

Books

• Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024). (Excerpt on Google Books.)
  Reviews: Yale Review; Genre; Dagens Nyheter; Review 31; The Point Magazine; Los Angeles Review of Books; TLS; Critical Inquiry; Modern Philology; German Studies Review; The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory.
  Interview: Liberties.
  Revised German translation: Etwas spricht mich an. Wie Kritik beginnt (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2026).

• Stichwörter für die kritische Praxis, edited by Michel Chaouli and others (Berlin: Diaphanes, 2023).

• Poetic Critique: Encounters with Art and Literature, edited by Michel Chaouli and others (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2021, full text).

• Thinking With Kant's Critique of Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). (Preface, Belated Afterword; HUP; Amazon.com). Reviews in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews; SGIR Review; The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

• The Laboratory of Poetry: Chemistry and Poetics in the Work of Friedrich Schlegel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002). (Google Books; order or search the book at Amazon.com).
  German translation: Das Laboratorium der Poesie: Chemie und Poetik bei Friedrich Schlegel, trans. Ingrid Proß-Gill (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2004). (Order at Amazon.de)

 Articles and Book Chapters

• “Wie man den Durchlauferhitzer herunterdreht (oder: Wozu Postkritik gut ist),” Postismen. Vom Nutzen und Nachteil eines Denkmusters für die Wissenschaften, ed. Dieter Thomä (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2026), 164 – 178. (PDF)

• "Failing and Falling," On Failing, edited by Amit Chaudhuri (Chennai: Westland Books, 2025), 98 - 110. (PDF; video of the talk).

• “It Begins Around the Eyes (‘In the Penal Colony’),” New Literary History 55 (2024 [2025]): 355 – 368.

• “Intime Lektüre,” Einlässliche Lektüre, edited by Bernadette Grubner and others (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2024), 203 – 207.

• “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Criticism,” MLN 139 (2024): 553 – 566. (PDF)

• “Kritik als Stil (all the way down),” Geschichte der Philologien 63/64 (2023): 159 – 166.

• “What Is Poetic Critique,” written with Jan Lietz, Jutta-Müller Tamm, and Simon Schleusener, Poetic Critique: Encounters with Art and Literature, edited by Michel Chaouli and others (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2021), 1 – 6. (PDF)

• “Schlegel’s Words, Rightly Used,” Poetic Critique: Encounters with Art and Literature, edited by Michel Chaouli and others (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2021), 19 - 34. (PDF)

• “Irony,” German Aesthetics: Fundamental Concepts from Baumgarten to Adorno, ed. J. D. Mininger and Jason Peck (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 60 - 67.

• "Disgust," Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2: 417 – 21. (PDF)

• "Criticism and Style," New Literary History 44.3 (2013): 323 - 344. (PDF)

• "A Surfeit of Thinking: Kant's Aesthetic Ideas," The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 57 (2011; published 2013): 55 – 77. (PDF)

• "Human Voices and the Voice of Humanity in Kant's third Critique," Kultur-Schreiben als romantisches Projekt: Romantische Ethnographie im Spannungsfeld zwischen Imagination und Wissenschaft, ed. David Wellbery (Würzburg : Königshausen & Neumann, 2012), 43 – 60. (PDF).

• "Remix: Literatur. Ein Gedankenexperiment," Merkur 721 (2009): 463-76. (PDF)

• "Laocoön and the Hottentots," The German Invention of Race, ed. Sara Eigen & Mark Larrimore (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 23-31. (PDF)

• "Die 'Verwandtschaftstafeln der Buchstaben' und das große Lalula der Romantik: Zur Produktion von Sinn und Unsinn in der Literatur" ["The 'Table of Affinities of Letters' and the Great Lalula of Romanticism: On the Production of Sense and Nonsense in Literature"], "fülle der combination": Literaturforschung und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, ed. Bernhard Dotzler and Sigrid Weigel (Munich: Fink, 2005), 101-125.

• "How Interactive Can Fiction Be?" Critical Inquiry 31 (2005): 599-617. (PDF)

• "Signatures of Divinity," an essay on the work of Jakob Böhme, The New History of German Literature, ed. David Wellbery et al. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004), 265-270. (PDF)

• "Intimations of Mortality," an essay on Novalis's "Hymnen an die Nacht," The New History of German Literature, ed. David Wellbery et al. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004), 481-485. (PDF)

• "Irresistible Rape: The Lure of Closure in 'The Marquise of O….,'" The Yale Journal of Criticism 17.1 (2004): 51-81. (PDF)

• "The Politics of Permanent Parabasis," Studies in Romanticism 42 (2003): 323-340. (PDF)

• "Van Gogh's Ear," Modern Art and the Grotesque, ed. Frances Connelly (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 47-62. (PDF)

• "Kommunikation und Fiktion: Vom Schreiben und Lesen von Literatur im Internet" [Communication and Fiction: On Writing and Reading Literature in the Internet], Weimarer Beiträge 49, 1 (2003): 5-16. (PDF)

• "Friedrich Schlegels Labor der Poesie" ["Friedrich Schlegel's Laboratory of Chemistry"], Athenäum: Jahrbuch für Romantik 11 (2002): 59-70.

• "Was bedeutet: Online lesen? Über die Möglichkeit des Archivs im Cyberspace" [What Does it Mean to Read Online? On the Possibilities of the Archive in Cyberspace], Text + Kritik 152 (2001): 65-74.

• "Critical Mass, Fission, Fusion: Friedrich Schlegel's Volatile System," Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Neueren Germanistik 47 (2000): 131-149.

• "Die Verschlingung der Metapher. Geschmack und Ekel in der 'Penthesilea,'" Kleist-Jahrbuch 1998, 127-149. Revised translation of "Devouring Metaphor."

• "Devouring Metaphor: Disgust and Taste in Kleist's Penthesilea," The German Quarterly 69 (1996): 125-143. (PDF)

• "Positions on Heinrich Heine," Rethinking Germanistik: Canon and Culture, ed. Robert Bledsoe et al. (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 183-189.

• "Masking and Unmasking: The Ideological Fantasies of the Eighteenth Brumaire," Qui Parle 3 (1989): 53-71. (PDF)

 Commentary and Reviews

• “Wunsch, vom ‚Prozess’ zu berichten,” Berlin Review No. 23 (November 2026).

• “Small and Cheap and Common and Boring,“ Los Angeles Review of Books No. 50 (Fall 2026), 54 - 61.

• "Ending It," The Yale Review, Spring 2026.

• "Drei Sätze: Über John Williams' Stoner," Literaturwissenschaft Berlin (April 2026).

• "An Immesurable Field. On Kant's 300th Birthday," The Point Magazine, April 24, 2024.

• "Die Bilder werden andere," Die Zeit 37 (2013): 50. (PDF)

• "Markierte Körper," Die Zeit 44 (2012): 56. (PDF)

• "Les ironies d'une gymnastique," La quinzaine littéraire 951 (2007): 29-30. (PDF)

• Review of David Bindman, From Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002), Goethe Yearbook 2004.

• "The Perpetual Conflict in Cultural Studies: An Apology," Profession 2003, 55-65. (PDF)

• "Foreword," issue on German romanticism, Studies in Romanticism 42 (2003): 299.

• "Fakultativ vorbildhaft: Soll man für eine Universitätsreform auf US-Modelle schielen?" [On the Reform of German Universities According to US Models], Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 14, 2003. (PDF)

• "Gleichstrom: Das Patt in Florida zeugt von der Stabilität der Demokratie" [The Draw in the Florida Elections Testifies to the Stability of Democracy], Süddeutsche Zeitung, Nov. 28, 2000.

• "Ekel. Oder wie sich van Goghs Ohr entfaltet. Untersuchungen eines peinlich körperlichen Begriff [Disgust, or how Van Gogh's Ear Unfolds: Investigating a Painfully Physical Idea], Die Zeit 29 (1999): 45.

• "A Vast Unravelling. What Do Literary Studies Teach?" Commentary, Times Literary Supplement 5004 (1999): 14-15. (PDF)

• Review of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Political Crumbs, trans. Martin Chalmers (London: Verso, 1990), Qui Parle 5 (1991): 125-131.

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