Thinking Through German Literature with Andrew Jaszi: A Foundational Approach Applied to Goethe and Kafka

Brings to light an important and unconventional teacher of literature whose way of thinking and method are relevant in German Studies and beyond, particularly in view of the present crisis of the humanities.

At a time when enrollment in the humanities is said to be in ＂free fall＂ (Nathan Heller, The New Yorker, 2/27/2023), the figure of Andrew Jaszi offers an alternative vision of what a literary education might look like. Jaszi was a Hungarian-born philosopher and literary scholar in the German Department at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1948 to 1985. His accessible, jargon-free approach, a method he developed through analogy with Goethe’s unique way of doing science, attracted students of diverse backgrounds and majors to his classes, while also winning acclaim from colleagues who compared him to Wittgenstein and Buber.

Drawing on a set of previously unknown tape recordings of Jaszi’s seminars, this book offers readers the opportunity to witness this legendary teacher in action. The book’s immediate benefit is the illumination provided by Jaszi’s original interpretations of Goethe’s Faust and Kafka’s ＂The Judgment.＂ More broadly, it illustrates the transformative, whole-self education Jaszi advocated and himself embodied, one that runs counter to the technocratic imperatives of our time. Ultimately, the book’s goal is to make better known an important literary thinker and an unconventional teacher of German Studies, the value of whose work extends beyond a single discipline to humanities education in general, with special bearing on its present crisis and potential future.