Fellow at the Dahlem Humanities Center

May 2011 – August 2011

Humorous Dialectics: An Investigation of Subjectivity and Time in the Works of Jean Paul and Hegel

Bryan Klausmeyer studied European Intellectual History and German Thought at the University of Michigan, where he received his B.A. in 2009, and is now a graduate student in Modern German Thought and Literature at the Johns Hopkins University. His research project seeks to bring together the unlikely pair of Jean Paul and Hegel through an analysis of the role of humor in their respective works, concentrating in particular on the categories of subjectivity and temporality, and hence the ontological and aesthetic boundaries between finitude and the infinite, immanence and transcendence. In doing so, his research will explore and delineate the notion of a shared "interstitial" topos through which the conflicting philosophical and literary tendencies surrounding both thinkers (Kantian and post-Kantian thought, Classicism and Romanticism) may be critically assessed.