Elizabeth S. Goodstein
Ph.D., Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley, 1996

Research Interests

Elizabeth Goodstein’s research focuses on the ways modernity and modern subjectivity have been represented, understood, and experienced in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European literature and culture. Located at the intersections between literary studies, critical theory, and intellectual history, her work draws on her training in the classical and modern rhetorical traditions to synthesize the strategies of close textual analysis, historical interpretation, and philosophical reflection, exploring the relations between history and identity, language and experience from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Professor Goodstein is currently Director of Graduate Studies in the ILA and one of the founding co-directors of Emory University’s European Studies Project.

In the fall of 2007, she will be a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

Selected Publications

• Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Stanford University Press 2005)
  Awarded Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book
• Awarded German Studies Association/DAAD Book Prize
• “ ‘Behind the Poetic Fiction’: Freud, Schnitzler, and Feminine Subjectivity.” Psychoanalysis and History, 6 (2) 2004.
• “Style as Substance: Georg Simmel’s Phenomenology of Culture.” Cultural Critique 52 (2002).
• “Georg Simmels Phänomenologie der Kultur und der Paradigmenwechsel in den Geisteswissenschaften.” In Aspekte der Geldkultur. Neue Studien zu Georg Simmels Philosophie des Geldes (Edition Humboldt, 2002).

Books in Progress

• History in Repose: Unifying Memory in Contemporary Germany
• Georg Simmel and the Phenomenology of Culture
• Modernity and the Rhetoric of Fragmentation

Undergraduate Courses:

• Marx, Nietzsche, Freud
• Boredom and Modern Identity
• Sex and Death in Vienna
• Imagining Greece: Making German Culture

Graduate Courses:

• The Rhetoric of Fragmentation: Representing Subjective Experience in Modernity
• From Simmel to Adorno
• Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project