Emerson, Nietzsche, and the Romantic World; Franke Lectures in the Humanities

Dr. David Mikics is John and Rebecca Moores Distinguished Professor in English and the Honors College at the University of Houston. His lecture "Emerson, Nietzsche, and the Romantic World" was given as part of the Fall 2013 Franke Lectures in the Humanities at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale on September 26, 2013, a series organized in conjunction with the Yale College seminar taught by Paul North, Associate Professor of German, and Paul Grimstad, Assistant Professor of English. This undergraduate seminar presented perspectives on the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The lecture argues that we can use Emerson and Nietzsche to think about the tensions between the Enlightenment and Romanticism as ways of conceiving the world. Positing that we now live in an age dominated by Enlightenment-era thinking, Mikics also draws on Isaiah Berlin's definitions of these two intellectual ages to make an argument about their relevance for society today.