"All beginnings are difficult,” goes the saying, “but without them there wouldn't be endings." However, what makes beginnings so difficult? What kind of action is that? Which knowledge does it presuppose? And what would a beginning say about the end? We will pursue these questions by reading sacred, philosophical, literary, and scientific texts that, each in its own way, make a beginning.

This introductory course to German Romanticism explores chiefly Romantic poetics and its reflexive as well as ironic forms of communicating and knowing, which eschew rationalistic and scientific platitudes. Equally important will be the inherent contradictions of Romanticism, for it is division, not unity, speaking from its heart, the ecstatic experience of absence and failure--Sehnsucht.

It seems quite natural to capture past times by way of narrative representation. Certain theorists and historians even claimed that time is inherently narrative and therefore articulated best in the form of narrations. But is it even possible to narrate time? What kind of translation is that? And, above all, what are the costs of, and the resistances to, such a translation?

All beginnings are difficult, the saying goes. But it is perhaps still more difficult to find an ending under the endless conditions of modernity. Not long ago, the stories of literature defined the closure of actions, while philosophical systems provided the certain rules for sensible conclusions and ends, not to mention religious myths and revelations. What remains of such knowledge today?

The relationship between rhetoric and science is complicated. Since its inception, rhetoric has been suspected of obscuring the facts that science elaborates. But how plausible is this juxtaposition? Doesn't science itself have to be rhetorical in order to be effective? Is rhetoric not itself technique, knowledge, and science? And does literature promise to resolve this opposition?