Professor Anthony Phelan
Anthony Phelan, M.A., (Ph.D., Cambridge)
Faculty Lecturer in German, Fellow of Keble College
Address: Keble College, Oxford, OX1 3PG
Homepage: http://www.keble.ox.ac.uk/academics/about/dr-tony-phelan
Email: anthony.phelan@keble.ox.ac.uk
Tel: 01865 272763
Fax: 01865 272705
Research
Tony Phelan is currently working on the literary and philosophical effect of the friendship between Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, during their years of exile, including their conceptions of history and their investigation of gesture/Gestus. Benjamin, particularly in his study of Romantic art criticism and his work on Paris, in the Passagen-Werk, also provides a guiding critical approach to work on the philosophy and aesthetics of the Jena Romantics and their novels, particularly in relation to ideas of modernity and postmodernity. He is co-ordinator for the Oxford-Princeton research collaboration BENJAMIN ENCOUNTERS.
Teaching
German language, and literature from the 18th century to the present, particularly Goethe, the Romantics, Heine, Rilke, Kafka, Thomas Mann and Brecht.
Graduate Teaching
The classic/romantic canon; the culture of the Weimar Republic; Walter Benjamin.
Publications
'Prose Fiction of the German Romantics', in The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism, ed. Nicholas Saul (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 41-65
'‘Meditation and its Distractions: Mörike’s “Im Weinberg” in context’', Oxford German Studies, 36 (2007), 34-46
Reading Heinrich Heine, Cambridge Studies in German (Cambridge: CUP, 2007)
'What Wilhelm Meister did next', PEGS, LXXV (2006), 109-24
'‘The State of the Art: Heine’s Atta Troll. Ein Sommernachtstraum and “Jehuda ben Halevy”’', Oxford German Studies, 33 (2004), 177-194
'Fortgang and Zusammenhang: Walter Benjamin and the Romantic Novel', in: Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, ed Beatrice Hanssen and Andrew Benjamin (Continuum, 2003), 69-82
'Returning Generals: Brecht's "The Manifesto" and its contexts', in: Empedocles' Shoe. Re-reading the Poems of Bertolt Brecht, ed. T.Kuhn and K.Leeder (London: Methuen, 2002), 131-150
'Novalis and the Hidden Door of Dream', in: Dream Images, ed. H. Castein and R. Görner (Munich: iudicium, 2002), 64-78
'The Classical and the Medieval in Goethe's Faust II', in: A Companion to Goethe's Faust: Parts I and II, ed. Paul Bishop (Woodbridge/Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001), 144-168
'July Days in Skovsbostrand: Brecht, Benjamin, and Antiquity', German Life and Letters, 53 (2000), 573-86
Rilke’s Neue Gedichte , Critical Guides to German Texts (London: Grant & Cutler, 1992)
Editor, The Weimar Dilemma. Intellectuals in the Weimar Republic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985)