Gerhard Richter
Professor of German
Ph.D., Princeton University
Email: grichter@ucdavis.edu
Office: 404 Sproul
Office Hours
Professor Richter, who holds degrees in German and Comparative Literature, received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1996. His research and teaching focus on European Critical Thought since Kant; modern German literature and culture; literature and philosophy; Frankfurt School; deconstruction; literary, cultural, and aesthetic theory.
Professor Richter is the author of Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000; 2nd edition, 2002); Ästhetik des Ereignisses. Sprache-Geschichte-Medium (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2005); and Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers' Reflections from Damaged Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). He is the editor of Benjamin's Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Literary Paternity, Literary Friendship (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Rereading Adorno,Special Issue of Monatshefte 94: 1 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002); Language Without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010); and co-editor, with Jost Hermand, of Sound Figures of Modernity: German Music and Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). Professor Richter also has published dozens of articles and book chapters in venues such as New German Critique, Weimarer Beiträge, The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, The German Quarterly, Journal of Visual Culture, qui parle, and Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. He currently is at work on a book-length study that examines the concept of "afterness" in modern thought and aesthetics. The chapters are grouped around writers such as Hölderlin, Kafka, Freud, Heidegger, Bloch, Adorno, Lyotard, Derrida, and Arendt. Professor Richter recently presented portions of this research in a series of lectures and seminars in the Department of Comparative Literature at SUNY Buffalo.
An award-winning teacher, he offers undergraduate courses on such topics as "Marx, Nietzsche, Freud," "The Writing of the Disaster: Representations of the Holocaust in Germany and the US," "Literature and Photography," and "What Is Enlightenment? Readings in German Intellectual History." Recent graduate seminars include "Walter Benjamin: Aesthetics, Media, Modernity," "Heidegger and Lyric Poetry," "What Is Art? Aesthetic Theory from Kant to Adorno," "Of Friends and Enemies," "Frankfurt School Critical Theory," and "Europe—The Very Idea." In addition to his teaching in the Department of German, Professor Richter regularly offers courses in the Graduate Program in Critical Theory. He serves on the executive committee of this program and also is affiliated with Comparative Literature.
Before joining the faculty at the University of California, Professor Richter served as a tenured faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught for nearly a decade and was honored with the university-wide H. I. Romnes Faculty Award for excellence in research. He also co-directed an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Interdisciplinary Workshop for faculty and graduate students on "Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity" at the University of Wisconsin's Center for the Humanities. In addition to delivering frequent invited lectures and guest seminars at institutions such as Cornell, UC Berkeley, NYU, Penn, Princeton, Syracuse, UCLA, Northwestern, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena (Germany), Andrássy University (Budapest), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Professor Richter has served as a visiting scholar at the Universität zu Köln (2004); as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Rheinische-Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn (2007); and as a DAAD Faculty Fellow at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf (2008).
The most recent conference he organized was the three-day world congress, "Benjamin's Frontiers," held at UC Davis in conjunction with the International Walter Benjamin Society. See http://langlit.ucdavis.edu/home/grichter/ for conference information.
Books
Language Without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity. Ed. Gerhard Richter. New York: Fordham University Press (2010)
Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life. (“Cultural Memory in the Present” Series) Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.
Sound Figures of Modernity: German Music and Philosophy. Eds. Jost Hermand and Gerhard Richter. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006
Ästhetik des Ereignisses. Sprache-Geschichte-Medium. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2005.
Benjamin's Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory. Ed. Gerhard Richter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Literary Paternity, Literary Friendship. Ed. Gerhard Richter. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography. (“Kritik: German Literary Theory and Cultural Studies” Series) Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000. [2nd edition 2002.]
Selection of Recent Essays
“Acts of Memory and Mourning: Derrida and the Fictions of Anteriority.” Mapping Memory.
Eds. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz. New York: Fordham University Press (in press).
"Zu spät? Nachheit und Kritik." Weimarer Beiträge: Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft, Ästhetik und Kulturwissenschaften 55: 1 (2009): 99-118.
"Conditionality, Unconditionality, and the Corporate University: Is Everything for Sale?” theory@buffalo 13 (2009): 45-79.
"Unsettling Photography: Kafka, Derrida, Moses.” CR: The New Centennial Review, Special Issue: "Remainders: Of Jacques Derrida," ed. David E. Johnson, 7: 2 (Fall 2007): 155-173.
"Gastfreundschaft zwischen Aporie und Hoffnung. Zu Reinhard Lettaus Roman Flucht vor Gästen." Positive Dialektik. Hoffnungsvolle Momente in der deutschen Kultur. Festschrift für Klaus L. Berghahn zum 70. Geburtstag. Ed. Jost Hermand. German Life and Civilization, vol. 45. Oxford: Lang, 2007. 261-277.
"Can Hope Be Disappointed? Contextualizing a Blochian Question." Symploke: A Journal for the Intermingling of Literary, Cultural, and Theoretical Scholarship (University of Nebraska Press) 14: 1-2 (2006): 42-54.
"Aesthetic Theory and Nonpropositional Truth Content in Adorno." New German Critique 97 (Winter 2006): 119-135.
"Siegfried Kracauer." Europe Since 1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of War and Reconstruction. Eds. John Merriman and Jay Winter. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2006. 1587-1588.
"Crude Thinking Rethought: Reflections on a Brechtian Concept." Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities (Oxford, UK) 10: 3 (2005): 3-13.
"Acts of Self-Portraiture: Benjamin’s Confessional and Literary Writings." The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin.Ed. David Ferris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 221-237.
