Reading After Foucault

Book excerpt: Reading After Foucault presents new readings of German literature, letters, and culture from 1750 to 1830, based upon the pioneering work of the late Michel Foucault. Discussing the structures of historical-thought systems, the emergence of the human sciences, modern institutions of reading and writing, and technologies of self-fashioning, the authors extend Foucault's research into the system of writing technologies and power relations and reexamine the canon and the disciplines and institutions which make it possible. The book seeks to contribute to a "history of the present" by analyzing the networks in and through which literary modernity has been manufactured. New readings of Wezel, Kleist, Reinhold, Herder, Schiller, Campe, Goethe, the story of Kaspar Hauser, Hölderlin, Hamann, and Novalis are featured.