[Anthropgrad] Work-in-Progress Seminar - 3 October - Ned Curthoys

[Sharon Komidar]

The Research School of Humanities presents,
 Work-in-Progress Seminar Series 

1- 2.30 pm, Friday 3rd October, Theatrette, Old Canberra House

Lessing's 'Nathan the Wise' and the fate of Andalusia

Dr Ned Curthoys

Postdoctoral Fellow, Research School of Humanities, ANU

 

'Nathan the Wise', Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's famous play of 1779, has
often been celebrated as the emblematic drama of Enlightenment values
such as rational universalism, humanism, and religious tolerance. Yet
contemporary readings of Nathan the Wise have been mindful of the
lugubrious shadow over German history cast by the Holocaust. Since the
Holocaust a more pessimistic reading has proved influential, in which
Lessing's quintessentially rational and humane hero Jewish Nathan is
found to lack Jewish cultural characteristics, a figure for all those
German Jews throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who were
eager to shed their Jewish identity and conform to German and Christian
cultural norms. This paper queries this reading of Nathan the Wise and
suggests that Lessing's complex play evokes the cosmopolitan Levantine
world of Andalusia/Moorish Spain as a profound challenge to Eurocentric
conceptions of history. 

 

Ned Curthoys is a postdoctoral fellow at the Research School of
Humanities.  He completed his PhD in the English Department at the
University of Sydney in 2002. His doctorate focused on the dissemination
of the humanist tradition of classical rhetoric into twentieth century
literary theory, philosophy, and political theory. Post-PhD he has
researched and published on the political theorist Hannah Arendt's

 

Convenors: Ken Taylor and Stephen Foster
For general enquiries please contact: 
Phone: 6125 2434
Email: administration.rsh at anu.edu.au 
Web: http://rsh.anu.edu.au/
All Welcome