After getting a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1990 and teaching for four years at Virginia Tech, I started in my current position at the UO in 1996. My research ranges from the Age of Goethe to contemporary literature. It addresses the relationship between identity formation and artistic creativity. I am interested in how writers attain a sense of who they are through the creation of literature.

The impetus for defining the self is most compelling at times of uncertainty. At the end of the eighteenth-century many writers attempted to give their individual lives purpose in a world that they felt had become devoid of transcendental meaning due to the erosion of religious belief systems. The literature of this time is highly self-reflective and provides insights into how writers compensated for the loss of meaning by creating an inner self. I have recently finished a book manuscript, entitled Narcissism and Paranoia in the Age of Goethe that examines German middle-class intellectuals' search for a sense of self during that period.

How do my intellectual interests relate to my teaching? Why should students be fascinated by works that were written two hundred years ago and in language that is really hard to understand? How can I link the problems addressed in these texts to today's students' concerns? Only if students are stimulated to draw from their own experiences can they make original contributions and develop a genuine enthusiasm for the literature.

These considerations provoke the question why eighteenth century German literature is still pertinent. Eighteenth-century ideas about what it means to be human may be more relevant than ever in view of new advances in bio-technology. Central figures in German and European arts and letters strove to define what it means to be human in a physiological, intellectual, and ethical sense. The universal ideals they helped to establish, such as freedom, equality, moral justice, and compassion, still influence today's moral values. In my current research I explore whether humanist ethics might still have purchase in a postmodern world. I address the issue of whether these universal principles can still have a justification in a racially, culturally, ethnically, and socially diverse society with a pluralist mix of life-styles.

About his most current book, Narcissism and Paranoia in the Age of Goethe

This is the first book-length study that examines how literary narcissism in the Age of Goethe intersects with concepts of creativity, language, gender, and national identity, and how major German writers of this period anticipate the formation of what today is recognized as the Freudian concept of narcissism (Herder, Moritz, Goethe, Tieck, Hoffmann). Long before the Freudian interpretaion of narcissism, late eighteenth-century German writers used the Greek myth of Narcissus to explore the understanding of the self. Narcissism refers to the creation of an idealized image of the self and the desire to merge with this image.

Beginning in the 1770's, writers like Goethe, Herder, Schiller, and Moritz shaped a new bourgeois aesthetics by depicting and working through the the discrepancies between their real-life constraints and their idealist ambitions. The literature of the period is highly self-reflective. It provides insights into how writers attempted to contend with uncertainties connected to the loss of faith in a universal order. For the writers of this time, literature became a mirror that reflected their struggle with bourgeois identity. The study shows that the narcissistic scenario was particularly attractive to eighteenth-century authors because it could both capture and conceal the contradictions inherent in enlightenment thinking. Failure to reconcile thses contradictions, however, can reveal the inadequacies of the self and result in unbearably haunting visions that give way to paranoid delusions. The insecurities and the narcisssistic repsonses expressed in these texts have helped shape ideas about art, language, gender, and national identity in German and Western culture.

The analyses of poems, narratives, dramas, and critical texts by Moritz, Schiller, Herder, Tieck, Goethe, Lavater, and others shed new light on how progress in the medical, philosophical, and anthropological discourses of the time converge with aesthetic and literary considerations.

The volume illustrates how aspects of Freud's psychology have grown out of ntions of subjectivity not confined to the Victorian age, as is often assumed, but with roots in the contradicting values of bourgeois emancipation. These values were passed on and contested in the middle-class family, whose patriarchal structure and ethics have survived the technological and social transformations fo the last two hundred years. The masculinist presentations or exclusions of the feminine bear witness to how male authors themselves became enwrapped and even restricted by patriarchal power structures. The autocratic yet also bourgeois traditions both conflicted and conjoined with the incompatible values of modernity. The challenge of reconciling these tensions played out in the dialectic of narcissim and paranoia that has been so richly present in German literature of the past two centuries.