Senior Fellow in Research Area 1: "Competing Communities"

May 2024

Meditating with Weimar: Literature and Spirituality

Meditating with Weimar: Modernism and Spirituality is an exploration in cognitive literary studies. Modernist writers, for example, Hermann Hesse, Alfred Döblin, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann as well as psychoanalysts including C.G. Jung explored paths of spiritual and physical liberation vis-à-vis the critique of Protestantism and the crisis after World War I. Religious ideas and practices from East Asia such as Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism significantly contributed to this spiritual exploration and the quest for psychic healing in Weimar modernism. The project examines the intersections between East Asian and German European cultures from the perspective of spirituality in modernist literature. The spiritual pursuit in the modernist period was seminal for religious and cultural movements in the West throughout the twentieth century to date. This project aims to show that healing and narration are inextricably connected in a global context.

Chunjie Zhang is Associate Professor of German at the University of California, Davis, where she is also affiliated faculty in East Asian Studies, Religious Studies, Comparative Literature, Critical Theory, Cultural Studies and the Global Migration Center. Zhang is the author of Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism (Northwestern UP, 2017). She edited or co-edited the volumes Composing Modernist Connections in China and Europe (2019) and Gender and German Colonialism (2023) as well as journal issues on Aesthetics and Politics in the Wake of the Enlightenment (The Germanic Review, 2020), Goethe, Worlds, and Literatures (Seminar, 2018), and Asian German Studies (German Quarterly, 2020). Her articles appeared in venues such as The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Critical Inquiry, Journal of the History of Ideas, German Studies Review, European Review, Zeithistorische Forschungen, among others.