David Roberts (academic)
David Gordon John Roberts (born 2 December 1937) is an Australian professor of German studies.
Life
Roberts was born in 1937 and studied French and German at Oxford University and Cologne University. He resigned from the Research Department of the Foreign Office, London to take up a position in 1964 in the Department of German at the newly founded Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, where he taught modern German Literature and was active in developing courses in Comparative Literature and European Studies. He was awarded a Ph.D in 1968, supervised by Leslie Bodi, the founding professor of German Studies at Monash.
Professional career
- 1963-64 Research Department, Foreign Office, London
- 1964 Senior Teaching Fellow, Dept. of German, Monash University, Melbourne
- 1966 Lecturer, Monash
- 1971 Senior Lecturer, Monash
- 1984 Reader, Monash
- 1984 Visiting Professor, Washington University, St. Louis
- 1990 Visiting Professor, Bristol University (exchange programme)
- 1991 Personal Chair in German Studies, Monash
- 2001 Emeritus Professor
Main areas of research
His main areas of research are modern German literature, socio-aesthetics of literature and the arts, and the aesthetic theory and cultural history of European modernism.
Modern German Literature: His work ranges from monographs and articles on individual writers (Heinrich Mann, Goethe, Elias Canetti, Alexander Kluge, Günter Grass) to essays on the socio-historical periodization of German literature after 1945 with a special focus on 1968 and 1989/90; the scope and limits of social histories of literature; globalization, the end of national literatures, world literature.
Socio-Aesthetics: With reference to Western Marxism and post-Marxism, articles on Lukacs, Adorno, Benjamin, on the Budapest School (Agnes Heller, Ferenc Feher, György Markus), on theories of modernism and postmodernism; with reference to Luhmann’s systems theory: articles on literature and self-reference, self-observation in the literary system, self-reference in Derrida and Luhmann; with reference to contemporary theories of cultural production: the sociology of the boheme, the rise of the bohemian city, the creative economy and aesthetic capitalism, aesthetics of the spectacle.
Aesthetic Theory and History of European Modernism: This is the subject of a trilogy of books, Art and Enlightenment. Aesthetic Theory after Adorno (1991), with Peter Murphy; Dialectic of Romanticism (2004); and The Total Work of Art in European Modernism (2011).
Awards
- Fellowship, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation 1969, 1981, 1997
- Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities 1986-
- Centennial Medal for Service to German Studies in Australia 2001
Editorial activities
- Co-editor Thesis Eleven. Critical Theory and Historical Sociology 1983-
- International Advisory Board, Germanistik 1987-
- International Editorial Board, The German Quarterly 1988-1994
- Co-editor, “Monash European Studies”, Berg Publishers, Oxford/New York/Hamburg, 1988–1993
- International Advisory Board, “Studies in Contemporary German Literature”, Stauffenburg, Tübingen, 1997–2002
- Advisory Board, Limbus. Australian Yearbook of German Literary and Cultural Studies
Publications
Books
- Artistic Consciousness and Political Conscience: The Novels of Heinrich Mann 1900-1938. Bern, Lang, 1971(Australian and New Zealand Studies in German Language and Literature 2)
- Kopf und Welt: Elias Canettis Roman “Die Blendung”. München, Hanser Verlag, 1975 (“Literatur als Kunst”, ed. Walter Höllerer)
- The Indirections of Desire. Hamlet in Goethes Wilhelm Meister. Heidelberg, Carl Winter Verlag, 1980 (“Reihe Siegen”, ed. Helmut Kreuzer & Karl Riha
- Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno. Lincoln, London, University of Nebraska Press, 1991 (Modern German Culture and Literature, ed. Peter Hohendahl) . Reissued as paperback 2005
- See review article: Max Pensky, “Choosing Your Mask”, New German Critique 63 (1994), 161-180
- Dialectic of Romanticism. A Critique of Modernism. With Peter Murphy, London: Continuum, 2004
- 'Canetti’s Counter-Image of Society. Crowds, Power, Transformation. With Johann P. Arnason, 'Rochester, N.Y., Camden House, 2004.
- The Total Work of Art in European Modernism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011 (Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought ed. Peter Hohendahl) See review article: Roger Fornoff, ‘At the Interface of Art, Religion, Politics‘, Thesis Eleven 123 (2014), 123-128.
A Festschrift for David Roberts was published on his 70th birthday: Christine Magerski, Robert Savage, Christiane Weller (eds), Moderne begreifen. Zur Paradoxie eines sozio-ästhetischen Deutungsmusters. Wiesbaden: Deutsche Universitäts-Verlag, 2007.; He also wrote
some hundred journal articles and chapters in books, on German literature, literary history and sociology, critical theory, systems theory, aesthetic theory, including essays in A New History of German Literature (Harvard UP)
