In his new book Morality and Literature: A Historical Typology (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2013)—in German: Moral und Literatur. Eine historische Typologie—Christian Kirchmeier, post doc at the University of Munich who is currently at Yale for a research stay, examines a change of different moral systems within the course of history. By looking at very many different German literary texts from different centuries he tries to find something which he calls “the historical grammar of moral judgments,” which basically means changes in morality on a structural level. Authors and works he therefore considers include Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools, Andreas Gryphius’ Leo Armenius, Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Johann Christoph Gottsched’s Dying Cato, Johann Gottfried Schnabel’s The Island Felsenburg, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, Friedrich Schiller’s Aesthetic Education, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Mademoiselle de Scuderi and Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities.

For more information about Dr. Kirchmeier please check out: http://christian-kirchmeier.de/.