Since around 2000, the figure of the savant has featured prominently in German prose fiction. The use of fantastic, unreliable and self-reflective narration has been equally apparent. Dr. Hermann’s talk will consider the two phenomena as elements of an overarching attempt at a literary critique of reason in which the reductiveness of formal logic and instrumental rationality is counterposed with specifically aesthetic dimensions of literary form as a medium of critique and an alternative source of knowledge.
Dr. Leonhard Herrmann is a lecturer at the University of Leipzig and currently visiting scholar in the Department for Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago.