Childhood Imaginaries: Romanticism, Psychoanalysis, and Beyond

Catalog description

Since the Enlightenment, childhood has been at the center of the Western imagination. In German-language literature, political models of society, psychological theories on the dynamics of thinking and feeling, and critical discussions of history are often negotiated on the basis of an outline of what childhood is. This is because studying how humans develop promises to provide insight into what it means to be human and permits one to construct images of how humans should live. This line of thought breaks from a centuries-old convention of equating children with animals due to their lack of articulate speech and regretting this phase. In this course, we will read key texts of German-language literature from the Enlightenment to the present day that expound childhood as a special, formative epoch of individual life that, at the same time, grants insight into social dynamics.