Literary Criticism and the Public Sphere

This issue of Telos, which builds upon a recent conference in honor of Peter Hohendahl, brings together a selection of articles that address questions of the theory of the public sphere and its transformations across time and in different media. Literature, Criticism, Public Sphere: the Hohendahl paradigm brings these three terms together in multiple configurations. Works of literature have the distinctive capacity to elicit discussion and the habit of criticism. Precisely why literature occupies a privileged position in generating critical perspectives is another matter, having to do either with its imaginative character, i.e., its aesthetic autonomy, or, alternatively, with its capacity to provide life-practical orientation. Whatever the argument for the specific benefit of literature, it is the discussion about literature that is crucial here. Literary criticism incubates a general capacity for criticism, and this criticism then amplifies the public sphere. Civic virtue begins, counterintuitively, in aesthetic experience.

Introduction
Russell A. Berman

Media and Architecture at the Birth of the Public Sphere
Daniel Purdy

Historicist Orientalism as a Public Absolute: On Herder's Typo-teleology
Jeffrey S. Librett

Toward an Anti-Monumental Literary-Critical Style: Notes on Walter Benjamin and Jean Paul
Sean Franzel

Marx, Heine, and German Cosmopolitanism: The 1844 Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher
Eleanor Courtemanche

Literary? Public? Proletarian: Öffentlichkeit and Erfahrung among the Haymarket Martyrs
Loren Kruger

Citizen-Soldiers and Militarized Nostalgia: Genres of War and Place in the 1950s Public Sphere
Jaimey Fisher

Offending the Public: Handke, Herzog, Hypnosis
Brad Prager

"A Certain Light, But Only a Juridical Light": The Legal Aesthetics of Thomas Bernhard's The Lime Works
Casey Servais

The Public Intellectual as Survivor: The Cases of Josef Haslinger and Kathrin Röggla
Katharina Gerstenberger

The Politics of "Theory" in a Late Twentieth-Century University: A Memoir
Arthur C. T. Strum

Openness as a Form of Closure: Public Sphere, Social Class, and Alexander Kluge's Counterproducts
Michael Bray

Humanities and the Public Sphere: Scholarship, Language, Technology
Russell A. Berman

Reviews

Hitchens's Crusade
Adrian Pabst