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Jews on Ships; or, How Heine's Reisebilder Deconstruct Hegel's Philosophy of World History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Todd Samuel Presner
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Abstract

Although it is known that Heine attended Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of world history and became involved with the Hegelian-inflected “science of Judaism” just before beginning the Reisebilder, little attention has been given to Heine's early engagement with Hegelian ideas in his travel writings. This essay argues that Heine transforms the travel narrative into a critique of history by taking the grand historical narrative, with its investment in the “Greek” trope of seafaring, and deconstructing its systematic claims of national belonging and teleological development. Through an analysis of the North Sea poems, I show how Heine reworks both the genre of travel literature as self-discovery and Hegel's geographically determined movement of “World Spirit.” The result is a nonsystematic Jewish conception of historicity, which, in its embrace of particularity, subverts the absolutism of Hegel's philosophy of history by exposing the metaphors on which the philosophy's progressive development relies.

Type
Special Topic: Imagining History
Information
PMLA , Volume 118 , Issue 3: Special Topic: Imagining History , May 2003 , pp. 521 - 538
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2003

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