Kant and Literary Studies

Claudia Brodsky studied Comparative Literature at Harvard and Yale, where she taught German and Comparative Literature before joining the Comparative Literature Department at Princeton. From her early pathbreaking study of Kant and fiction, The Imposition of Form: Studies in Narrative Representation and Knowledge (1987) to The Linguistic Condition: Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action (2021), she has pioneered the investigation of Kant's importance to our critical understanding of literature.

• Part I. Kant on Literature: 1. 'Differing Only in Degree': Judging and Making in Kant and Wordsworth Paresh Chandra; 2. On Power in an Extra-Secular Sense: Kant's Analytic of the Sublime David Martyn; 3. Kant and the Problem of Tragedy Robert Pippin; Part II. Kant, Literary Theory, and the Critical Formation of the 'Human' Disciplines: 4. 'A New Light Broke Upon the First Person ....': Transcendental Argument, History of Science, and Narrative Intervention in Kant's Critique and the Kleistian Novella Rüdiger Campe; 5. Modern Being in the World: Kant's Philosophical Anthropology and Wordsworth's Poetry Richard Eldridge; 6. Language Enjoined: Ethics as Form of Address in Kant and Levinas Gabriela Basterra; 7. Narrative Discontinuity: Kant's History of Religion(s) Karen Feldman; Part III. Kant and Literature: 8. Kleist Reading Schiller After Kant: The Fate of 'Beautiful Souls' Tim Mehigan; 9. 'Critique:' Literary Form, Concept, Philosophical Project Willi Goetschel; 10. 'The Shapes My Brain Holds': Kantian Spontaneity and Woolf's The Waves Maya Kronfeld; 11. The Poetics of a Transcendental Deduction: The Self-Erasing 'I' in Kant Tawada, and Benveniste John Kim; 12. Ethically Speaking, or 'Freedom' in Context: Poetics, Critical Economy, and Kant's Invention of the 'Category' of the 'Possible' Claudia Brodsky.