Montaigne
French Renaissance
Skepticism
History of ideas
Montaigne as a mediator of skeptical thought
His influence on Kant, Hume, Schopenhauer & Nietzsche
Autobiographical preoccupation
The Essay as a prose genre
Lexical Semantics
Linguistic structuralism (Saussure, etc)
The sign & significance
Valenztheorie & syntactic analysis
Meaning: the juncture of syntax & semantics, of actuality & virtuality
Felix
Paul
Greve & Frederick
Philip
Grove;
Autobiographical
fiction
Goethe's Dichtung & Wahrheit as FPG's model
His obsessive self-referencing
His crafty use of pseudonyms
His conflicting needs to conceal [the
less glorious sides of his past, such as a prison sentence for fraud in
1903/4, & double-selling
his Swift translation in 1909] & to
reveal his relations with famous contemporaries like Stefan
George, Gide, H. G. Wells, likely Meredith & Swinburne, & possibly
Knut Hamsun
His ossified aesthetics in poetry & prose, remaining
fundamentally unchanged from ca. 1900 to his death in 1948
The quality of his translations of World Literature into German:
from excellent to mediocre
FPG & FrL's 1904/5 Poetry Cycle, published under their joint
pseudonym "Fanny Essler"
The intricate biographical intertextuality
The medieval wing-altar structure
The Petrarchan- or Dantean overtones
Else Ploetz, Endell, Greve, & Baroness
von Freytag-Loringhoven
Her autobiography. correspondence, German poetry
Her experiences in the Berlin of the 1890s & the 1920s
Her acquaintance with prominent members of the Stefan George
Circle, ca. 1900, & with New York Dada representatives like Man Ray & Marcel
Duchamp, ca. 1920
Her affiliation with prominent women like Margaret Anderson & Jane
Heap of The Little Review, Djuna Barnes, Berenice Abbott,
etc.
Her artistic accomplishments in poetry, prose, sculpture,
collage, body-art & "ready-made" objects
Her place among American women in New York & Paris in the
mid-1920s
Her excellent judgement of traditional aesthetics (including
Greve's whom she considered devoid of creative spirit, but a master
of form)
Her pro-active role in avant-garde art movements, etc.
