Part of the Mahindra Humanities Center's German Studies: New Perspectives series. Lecture is in German; Q&A in English or German. In the context of the German Studies Seminar, the purpose of this lecture is to show how the practice of close reading central to modern literary criticism can yield new insights into one of the most famous and discussed painters in the Western tradition. It is also an opportunity to hear a lecture in German. Read more here
Peter J. Burgard has been a professor in the Harvard German Department for 36 years. He writes on mainly German poetry, drama, narrative, and the essay, on mainly European painting, sculpture, and architecture, and on mainly German intellectual history — ranging, in various combinations, from the 16th to the 20th century. In addition, he translates German poetry into English. In his publications he addresses the work of Luther, Caravaggio, Bernini, Rubens, Opitz, Fleming, Velázquez, Zesen, Gryphius, Borromini, Hoffmannswaldau, de Hooch, Grimmelshausen, E.Q. and C.D. Asam, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Mann, Kafka, Adorno, Miller, and Warhol.
In 2019, he published Baroque: Figures of Excess in Seventeenth-Century European Art and German Literature. He is currently completing a small volume of translations of German poetry from c. 1770–1990, entitled Modern German Poetry, 1770–1990: Twenty-Seven Translations. Prior publications include Idioms of Uncertainty: Goethe and the Essay, Nietzsche and the Feminine, and Barock: Neue Sichtweisen einer Epoche, and he is currently working on a book entitled Caravaggio: Disturbing Naturalism and Double Entendre. Life permitting, there might also be books on Integral Ornament: Revolutions and Devolutions of the Decorative, Vienna 1683–1914 and Nietzsche and the Ethics of Atheism, which currently exist in bits and pieces.