Ottmar Ette

Ottmar Ette (born 14 December 1956 in Zell am Harmersbach, Black Forest, Germany) is Professor of Romance languages and Comparative literature at the University of Potsdam.

Biographical notes

In 1990, Ottmar Ette completed his dissertation at Freiburg University on the Spanish-American modernist and Cuban national icon José Martí. In 1995, his habilitation on French post-modern theorist Roland Barthes was accepted at Eichstätt University. In 2001, Ette received the "Hugo Friedrich und Erich Köhler"-award for his work on Roland Barthes from Freiburg University. Twice, he has been granted fellowships in advanced-study institutions. He has lectured and taught in a number of Latin-American and European countries, as well as in the USA. He has been a full professor Romance literature and comparative literature in Potsdam since 1995. To Ottmar Ette, Romance philology is a wide-ranging and inclusive academic field of inquiry which connects a number of disciplines and languages as it tells us about literary knowledge of human life.

Ottmar Ette is Chevalier in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques (France) since 2012. He has been a regular member of the Academia Europaea since 2010. Also in 2010, he was a fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. This was after having already received a fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin Institute for Advanced Study in 2004/2005. He has been involved in establishing a number of state-funded "Graduiertenkolleg"-graduate schools at German universities. He is a co-founder of a research-network on Latin-America in the wider Berlin area, ForLaBB (Forschungsverbund Lateinamerika Berlin-Brandenburg).[1]

He is founder and co-editor of the electronic journal HiN - Alexander von Humboldt im Netz (ISSN 1617-5239) and an online platform dedicated to von Humboldt avhumboldt.de - Humboldt Informationen online. Ette is also co-editor of the journal Iberoamericana (Madrid - Frankfurt am Main). Since 2009, he has also been co-editor of the electronic journal Istmo (Revista virtual de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos, ISSN 1535-2315). Since 2013, Ottmar Ette is member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In 2014, he was elected as honorary member of the Modern Language Association of America.[2] In 2014, Ottmar Ette received the Mexican Research Award "Escuela Nacional de Altos Estudios" from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.[3]

Research

The research and teaching of Ottmar Ette focus on: Alexander von Humboldt,[4] literary studies as a science of life,[5] living-together or "conviviality",[6] and TransArea Studies: poetics of movement and Francophone and Hispanophone literatures inside and outside Europe.[7] Since 2014, Ottmar Ette is the head of the research project "Alexander von Humboldts Amerikanische Reisetagebücher".[8]

Interests and Influence

Ottmar Ette's programmatic essay "Literaturwissenschaft als Lebenswissenschaft - Eine Programmschrift im Jahr der Geisteswissenschaften"[9] sparked wide-ranging reactions and discussion in Germany. Among many other publications, the theme reappeared in the national weekly paper Die Zeit.[10] The basic thrust of Ette's argument is to reconceptualize literary studies in terms of a science of life or "life science": "Lebenswissenschaft". Literature, Ette claims, is an essential repository of human knowledge on life, especially with respect to ethically relevant experiences such as living-together or "conviviality", migration and belonging, or survival in times of existential danger. The term "Lebenswissenschaft" is coined to oppose and call into question the increasing dominance of the biological or medical "life sciences", that have begun to monopolize and reduce concept and semantics of human life. Ette recently presented his argument in English in the Modern Language Association's PMLA.[11]

Ottmar Ette has also received much attention for his work on and editions of the writings of Alexander von Humboldt. He is considered a leading specialist on Humboldt's original scientific approach and extremely prolific work. Whereas Alexander von Humboldt has always been a well-known figure in the Americas, German reception had been heavily focused on the philological work of his older brother, Wilhelm von Humboldt. Ette's new editions of Alexander's colourful reports from his voyages have led to a more evenly balanced reception of the work of the two polymaths Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt. As early as 1987, Ette's work on Alexander von Humboldt earned him the "Heinz-Maier-Leibnitz" Award from the German Ministry of Culture and the German Research Association DFG. In the English-speaking world, Ottmar Ette and Vera M. Kutzinski (Vanderbildt University) recently published two critical editions of Humboldt's works: in 2011, the "Political Essay on the Island of Cuba; in 2012, the "Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas", both titles published with the University of Chicago Press.[12]

Publications

Monographs (selected titles)

(Co-)Edited volumes (selected titles)

Text Editions and Translations (selected titles)

Journal and book articles (selected titles in English)

References

  1. ↑ http://www.lateinamerika-forschung-berlin-brandenburg.de/
  2. ↑ http://news.commons.mla.org/2014/06/04/results-of-2014-ratification-vote/
  3. ↑ http://www.uni-potsdam.de/romanistik/ette/ette/aktuelles.html/
  4. ↑ http://www.uni-potsdam.de/romanistik/ette/avhumboldt.html
  5. ↑ http://www.uni-potsdam.de/romanistik/ette/lebenswissen.html
  6. ↑ http://www.uni-potsdam.de/romanistik/ette/konvivenz.html
  7. ↑ http://www.uni-potsdam.de/romanistik/ette/profil.htm
  8. ↑ http://www.uni-potsdam.de/romanistik/ette/avhumboldt.html
  9. ↑ Lendemains. Études comparées sur la France. Zeitschrift für vergleichende Frankreichforschung, 125. Gunter Narr, Tübingen 2007 ISSN 0170-3803 p.7 - 32
  10. ↑ Lendemains, op. cit., nos. 126/127, 128 and 129 and in Die Zeit
  11. ↑ PMLA. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (New York) CXXV, 4 (october 2010), pp. 977-993.
  12. ↑ http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/series/HUMBENG.html

External links

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