Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Germanic Languages and Literatures

First Advisor

Campe, Rüdiger

Abstract

In Terms of Theory attends to theory in relation to the eighteenth-century novel and to early twentieth-century film, primarily as the taking account of the possibility of form—of the novel, of film, and of theory. The overarching argument of the dissertation, developed in chapter 1, is that the novel and film, as modern forms unknown to classical aesthetics, present particularly rich cases for exploring what theory does, what it looks like, how it relates to its subject, and what kind of knowledge it offers. The rest of the dissertation presents independent case studies: chapter 2 analyzes and contextualizes the style of a paradigmatic film theory by Berthold Viertel; chapter 3 depicts the concept of the “theory of the novel” as it appeared in and around the works of Felix Bobertag, Johann Timotheus Hermes, Friedrich von Blanckenburg, and Friedrich Schlegel; and chapter 4 considers Béla Balázs’s handling of the term “theory.”

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