Chenxi Tang studied philosophy, comparative literature, and German literature at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (MA 1993) and Columbia University (PhD 2000). He had taught at the University of Chicago before joining the German Department at Berkeley in 2007. His research and teaching interests include German literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, cultural theory, political and legal thought, and modern European intellectual history. His publications so far have focused mostly on the period between 1750-1850. His book "The Geographic Imagination of Modernity: Geography, Literature, and Philosophy in German Romanticism" traces the emergence of the geographic paradigm in Western thought around 1800. He is currently working on a book project entitled "Imagining World Order: International Law and Literature in Europe, 1500-1900." This project investigates the ways in which literature joined hands with jurisprudence to envision a symbolic order of the world during the classical age of international law.
Courses for the academic year 2010/11:
German 147, German Drama and Opera
German 201C, Eighteenth-Century Literature
German 100, Introduction to Reading Culture
German 268, Law and Literature

For current research, please click here.

Translations

1. Søren Kierkegaard, Begrebet Ironi, translated from Danish into Chinese (Beijing: Chinese Social Sciences Press, 2005) = Collected Works of Kierkegaard in Chinese, vol. 1.

2.Søren Kierkegaard, Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift (in preparation) = Collected Works of Kierkegaard in Chinese, vol. 4-5.

Articles

• “Re-imagining World Order: From International Law to Romantic Poetics”, in Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 84 (2010), pp. 526-579;

• “Wetterdienst und Poesie. Zum Verhältnis von meteorologischem Wissen und politischer Ordnung im neuzeitlichen Staat und bei Friedrich Hölderlin“, in: Atmosphären, edited by Georg Braungart and Urs Büttner, forthcoming;

• „Figurations of Universal History in Moritz“, in: Karl Philip Moritz: Signaturen des Denkens, edited by Anthony Krupp. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010, pp. 293-304;

• „Poetologie der Kulturlandschaft bei Humboldt und Hölderlin“, in Romantische Räume, edited by Inka Mülder-Bach and Gerhard Neumann (Würzburg: Könighausen und Neumann, 2007), pp. 169-196;

• Tragedy of Popular Sovereignty: Hölderlin’s Der Tod des Empedokles”, in Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 81 (2007), pp. 346-368;

• „Landschaft als Medium. Zur Sichtbarmachung der Natur in der chinesischen und europäischen Landschaftsmalerei um 1000 und um 1800“, in Archiv für Mediengeschichte 7: Stadt – Land – Fluss. Medienlandschaften (2007), pp. 63-73;

• „Herder und die Entstehung der modernen Geographie“. In Der frühe und der späte Herder: Kontinuität und/oder Korrektur, edited by Gerhard Sauder (Heidelberg: Synchron, 2006), pp. 121-128;

• „Kierkegaard and the Culture of Psychological Experimentation in the Nineteenth Century“, in KulturPoetik: Zeitschrift für kulturwissenschaftliche Literaturwissenschaft / Journal For Cultural Poetics 6 (2006), pp. 172-188;

• „Romantische Orientierungstechnik: Kartographie und Dichtung um 1800“, in Topographien der Literatur: Deutsche Literatur im transnationalen Kontext, edited by Hartmut Böhme (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005), pp. 151-176;

• “Rhetorik mit Akzent: Mündlichkeit, Schriftlichkeit und Rhetorik der Kulturbeschreibung bei Herder“, in Rhetorik: Figuration und Performanz, edited by Jürgen Fohrmann (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2004), pp. 420-443;

• “Reading Europe, Writing China: European Literary Tradition and Chinese Authorship in Yu Dafu’s Sinking” (in English), in Arcadia: Internationale Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft/International Journal for Literary Studies 40 (2005), pp. 153-176;

• “Repetition and Nineteenth-century Experimental Psychology”, in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2002, pp. 93-118;

• “The Erosion of Romantic Love: From Friedrich Schlegel to E.T.A. Hoffmann”, in Romanticism in Theory, edited by Liz Møller and Marie-Louise Svane (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2000), pp. 208-221;

• “Writing World History: The Formation of Colonial Thinking at the Threshold to Modernity”, in Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory, edited by Raymond Vervliet and Annemarie Estor (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 175-185;

• „Two German Deaths: Nature, Body and Text in Goethe’s Werther and Storm’s Schimmelreiter”, in Orbis Litterarum 53 (1998), pp. 105-116.