Chenxi Tang studied philosophy, comparative literature, and German literature at Peking University, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (MA 1993), and Columbia University (PhD 2000). He had taught at the University of Chicago before joining the German Department at Berkeley in 2007. His research and teaching interests include German literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cultural theory, social and political thought, and modern European intellectual history. His book "The Geographic Imagination of Modernity: Geography, Literature, and Philosophy in German Romanticism" traces the emergence of the geographic paradigm in Western thought around 1800. He is currently working on a book project entitled "Imagining World Order: International Law and Literature from the Renaissance to the Nineteenth Century." This project investigates the ways in which literature joined hands with jurisprudence to envision a symbolic order of the world during the classical age of international law.
Courses for the academic year 2008/9:
German 179, German Drama and Opera
German 212A, Romantic Poetics and Politics
German 201C, Eighteenth-Century Literature

Translations

1. Søren Kierkegaard, Begrebet Ironi, translated from Danish into Chinese (Beijing: Chinese Social Sciences Press, 2005) = Collected Works of Kierkegaard in Chinese, vol. 1.

2.Søren Kierkegaard, Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift (in preparation) = Collected Works of Kierkegaard in Chinese, vol. 4-5.

Articles

1. "Two German Deaths: Nature, Body and Text in Goethe’s Werther and Storm’s Schimmelreiter”, in Orbis Litterarum 53 (1998), pp. 105-116.

2.“Writing World History: The Formation of Colonial Thinking at the Threshold to Modernity”, in Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory, edited by Raymond Vervliet and Annemarie Estor (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 175-185.

3.“The Erosion of Romantic Love: From Friedrich Schlegel to E.T.A. Hoffmann”, in Romanticism in Theory, edited by Liz Møller and Marie-Louise Svane (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2000), pp. 208-221.

4. “Repetition and Nineteenth-century Experimental Psychology”, in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2002, pp. 93-118.

5. “Reading Europe, Writing China: European Literary Tradition and Chinese Authorship in Yu Dafu’s Sinking”, in Arcadia: Internationale Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft/International Journal For Literary Studies 40 (2005), pp. 153-176.

6. “Rhetorik mit Akzent: Mündlichkeit, Schriftlichkeit und Rhetorik der Kulturbeschreibung bei Herder“, in Rhetorik: Figuration und Performanz, edited by Jürgen Fohrmann (Stuttgart: Metzler 2004), pp. 420-443.

7."Romantische Orientierungstechnik: Kartographie und Dichtung um 1800“, in Topographien der Literatur: Deutsche Literatur im transnationalen Kontext, edited by Hartmut Böhme (Stuttgart: Metzler 2005), pp. 151-176.

8."Herder und die Entstehung der modernen Geographie“. In Der frühe und der späte Herder: Kontinuität und/oder Korrektur, edited by Gerhard Sauder (Heidelberg: Synchron, 2006), pp. 121-128.

9."Kierkegaard and the Culture of Psychological Experimentation in the Nineteenth Century“, in KulturPoetik: Zeitschrift für kulturwissenschaftliche Literaturwissenschaft / Journal For Cultural Poetics 6 (2006), pp. 172-188.

10."Poetologie der Kulturlandschaft bei Humboldt und Hölderlin“, in Romantische Räume, edited by Inka Mülder-Bach and Gerhard Neumann (Würzburg: Könighausen und Neumann, 2007), pp. 169-196.

11."Die Sichtbarkeit der bewohnten Erde. Zur (Selbst)Darstellung der Kulturlandschaft in der chinesischen und europäischen Landschaftskunst (1000/1800)“, in Archiv für Mediengeschichte, No. 7: Stadt – Land – Fluss. Medienlandschaften (2007), pp. 63-73.

12.“The Tragedy of Popular Sovereignty: Hölderlin’s Der Tod des Empedokles”, in Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 81 (2007), pp.346-368.

13."Figurations of Universal History in Moritz“, in Signatures of Thought: Karl Philip Moritz (Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Germanistik), edited by Anthony Krupp, forthcoming