Eran Horowitz

Project at the MaCI

Can the earliest authors of liberalism offer a compelling vision of its promise, one we have not yet outgrown?

This project turns to the salon that Germaine de Staël gathered at Coppet between 1804 and 1817, where France met Germany and the Enlightenment fused with Romanticism. Around Staël and Benjamin Constant, a circle of writers thought through what it means to form a free mind, to be moved by enthusiasm, and to sustain irony under political pressure and rising nationalism. 

Out of their conversations, their letters, and their books, a distinctive idea of liberal culture took shape, one that insisted on what I call the "non-translatability of the Other", while acknowledging that one always translates an Other.  My project traces above all how the French read and translated German thought, and saw in its literature a modern reimagining of how the individual ought to develop under the new liberal institutions they imagined.

'During the fellowship I aim to complete a manuscript on early liberal criticism as it took shape between the Coppet and Berlin salons. Alongside it I will convene a workshop and a conference on the broader question of how literature and liberalism intersect. I also hope to engage with the digital humanities lab at the MaCI and to offer workshops on my work with the AI tools I use to analyse large corpora.  Beyond that, I want to work with the other MaCI fellows on public events devoted to art, literature, and translation.'
 

The work is carried out within Litt&Arts and the Charnières centre, under the supervision of Jean-Christophe Igalens, Professor of 18th-century French Literature at Université Grenoble Alpes.