Dorothea von Mücke
Tracing central ideas from Hannah Arendt’s meditation on the modern concept of history, Dorothea von Mücke hopes to show how Arendt’s engagement with a Rilke poem leads us to a more precise understanding of the important role of art — next to philosophy and science — in a critical approach to the philosophy of history.
Born in Germany, academically socialized in the US, Dorothea von Mücke is a teacher and scholar at Columbia University, where she is the Gebhard Professor of German Language and Literature. She is interested in the intersections of literature with philosophy and the visual arts, especially as it concerns the accessibility and “shelf life” of those forms of discourse and world making. She co-edited Harvard’s 2004 New History of German Literature and among her books are The Seduction of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale (2003) and The Practices of the Enlightenment. Aesthetics, Authorship and the Public (2015).
