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Biography
Laurie Johnson is Associate Professor of German, with a zero-time appointment in Comparative and World Literatures. Her research and teaching focus on eighteenth- through twentieth-century intellectual history, literature, philosophy, and culture. She earned the B.A. from Northwestern University and the M.A. and Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis. While completing her Ph.D. she taught at St. Louis Community College and at the College of Wooster (Ohio). She has studied or conducted research at the universities of Cologne, Regensburg, and Tübingen as well as at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach. After spending four years in a tenure-track position at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Johnson joined the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at UIUC in 2001.
Johnson's research to date has focused on intersections of literary, philosophical, psychological, and aesthetic discourses, in German Romanticism and in the "long" nineteenth century (approx. 1780-1930). Her book entitled The Art of Recollection in Jena Romanticism (Niemeyer, 2002) treats representations of memory and remembering in the philosophically seminal 1790's, and argues that Romantic theories of memory reflect the influence not only of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and critical philosophy, but of contemporary psychology and of natural science--and, in particular, of debates about the relationship between body and mind.
Her second book, entitled Aesthetic Anxiety (forthcoming with Rodopi Press), analyzes uncanny repetition in different cultural disciplines (psychology, literature, philosophy, and film), and attempts thereby to produce a new narrative about the centrality of aesthetics in modern subjectivity. The repetitive and often horrible, but sometimes simultaneously enjoyable, experience of anxiety can be an aesthetic mode as well as a psychological state, and Aesthetic Anxiety also explores ways in which anxiety illuminates the mind-body problem in German cultural products from the late eighteenth through twentieth centuries.
Johnson has developed and taught undergraduate and graduate courses on Romantic and Idealist philosophy and literature, on literary and cultural theory and criticism, on power and knowledge in the Western cultural tradition, and on various other aspects of literature and culture from 850 to the present.
In January 2007, Laurie Johnson was named Helen Corley Petit Scholar in the College of Arts and Sciences. This award recognizes exceptional research and teaching during the tenure probation period.
Johnson was named the James A. Hagan Teaching Fellow in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for 2006-2007.
Johnson's CV is accessible here.
Publications
Doctoral Thesis
Memory in Fragments: "Gedächtnis" and "Erinnerung" in Early Romanticism. Washington University in St. Louis, May 1997.
Books
The Art of Recollection in Jena Romanticism: Memory, History, Fiction, and Fragmentation in Texts by Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. Series: Studien zur deutschen Literatur, eds. Wilfried Barner, Georg Braungart, Richard Brinkmann, and Conrad Wiedemann. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2002. Pp. 196.
Aesthetic Anxiety: Uncanny Symptoms in German Literature and Culture. Accepted for publication by Rodopi Press. Manuscript 374 pp.
Articles and Chapters
"Reading the Excursus on Women as a Model of 'Modern' Temporality in
Gottfried's Tristan." Neophilologus 82.2 (1998) 247-257.
"'Wozu überhaupt ein Anfang? Memory and History in Heinrich von Ofterdingen." Colloquia Germanica 31.1 (1998) 21-36. This article was solicited for reprint in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism (NCLC), scheduled for release in 2007. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale.
"'Wenn man endlich selbst Briefe schreiben will, so vergesse man die Exempel': The Construction of Imitation as Originality in C. F. Gellert's Epistolary Theory." Wezel-Jahrbuch (Studien zur europäischen Aufklärung) 2 (1999) 97-114.
"Bringing Chaos Into the System: The Aesthetic Authority of Disorder in Friedrich Schlegel's Philosophical Fragments." Disrupted Patterns: On Chaos and Order in the Enlightenment. Eds. Theodore E. D. Braun and John A. McCarthy. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. 119-133.
"Geschichte als Erinnerungsfragment in der Philosophie Friedrich Schlegels."Zeitenwende - Die Germanistik auf dem Weg vom 20. ins 21. Jahrhundert (Akten des X. Internationalen Germanistenkongresses, Wien 2000). Ed. Peter Wiesinger. Bern: Peter Lang, 2002. 201-206.
"Psychic and Corporeal Displacement in Kleist's Die Familie Schroffenstein." Kleists Erzählungen und Dramen. Neue Studien. Eds. Paul Michael Lützeler and David Pan. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2001. 121-133.
"Dorothea Veit-Schlegel's Florentin and the Early Romantic Model of Alterity." Monatshefte 97.1 (2005) 33-62.
"Enlightenment According to Don Alfonso: Perilous Progress in Mozart's Cosí fan tutte." Practicing Progress: The Promise and Limitations of Enlightenment, eds. Richard E. Schade, Dieter Sevin, and Frank Trommler. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 59-74.
"The Curse of Enthusiasm: William Lovell and Modern Violence." Violence, Aesthetics, Culture: Germany, 1789-1938. Eds. Carl Niekerk and Stefani Engelstein. Amsterdam: Rodopi, forthcoming in 2007.
"The Romantic and Modern Practice of Animal Magnetism: Friedrich Schlegel's
Protocols of the Magnetic Treatment of Countess Lesniowska." Forthcoming in Women in German Yearbook 2008.
Translation
English Translation of "Die Nähe des Fremden," by Klaus Hoffer. World Literature Today (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1995) 517-520.
Lexicon Entries
"German Poetry 1750-1850." Co-authored with Carl Niekerk. Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation. Ed. Peter France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 309-313.
"Germany, Austria, Switzerland: Romanticism and Life Writing." Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. Ed. Margaretta Jolly. London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001. 368-370.
"Heinrich Heine." Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. Ed. Margaretta Jolly. London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001. 420-421.
Book Reviews in The German Quarterly, German Studies Review, Women in German Newsletter, GDR Bulletin
Recent Courses
- Modern Critical Theory: An Advanced Introduction
- German Cultural History (Middle Ages to the Present)
- The Dark Side of Modernity
- The Grimms’ Fairy Tales in Their European Context
- German Idealism and Romanticism
- Introduction to German Literature: Classicism to Postmodernism
- Advanced German Composition and Conversation
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