Beate Allert
Please join me in congratulating Beate Allert, professor of German, comparative literature, and film studies and director of the Comparative Literature program, on the publication of her new monograph, G.E. Lessing: Poetic Constellations between the Visual and the Verbal (Heidelberg: Synchron, 2018).
Beate’s book is an interpretation of the fables, plays, and philosophical treatises of the 18th century German writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. She examines Lessing's contributions to the theory of fable and to the intellectual emancipation of readers and spectators. She approaches Lessing's works as interrelated experiments testing various constellations between the visual and the verbal. She explains how Lessing's depiction of what he calls the "poignant moment" of an artwork raises important questions on the most effective timing of images, an insight which continues to have consequences for our understanding of interart relations and film theory even today.
Congratulations, Professor Allert!
David A. Reingold
Justin S. Morrill Dean
College of Liberal Arts