Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei

Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei

Professor and William Kurrelmeyer Chair in German, Director of Graduate Studies in German

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Research Interests: Continental Philosophy; Phenomenology; Aesthetics and Philosophy of Literature; Cognitive Literary Theory; Philosophy of Imagination; Modern German Literature and Thought., Literary Ecology and Environmental Studies

Education: DPhil, University of Oxford, PhD, Villanova University

Modern Languages and Literatures > People > Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei
Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei is Professor and Kurrelmeyer Chair in German and Professor in Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. She is author of seven books, including: Imagination: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford); On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life (Oxford); The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World (Columbia); Exotic Spaces in German Modernism (Oxford); The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature (Penn State); Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language (Fordham); and After the Palace Burns, which won The Paris Review Prize in Poetry.
She earned a DPhil in German and MSt in European Literature from the University of Oxford; MA and PhD in Philosophy from Villanova University; and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. In 2023, she was appointed Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. At Johns Hopkins, she is the founding organizer of the Environmental Humanities Research Initiative.
 
Her scholarly interests include phenomenology, existentialism, and other topics in post-Kantian philosophy, aesthetics and the philosophy of literature, cognitive literary theory, poetics, philosophy of imagination, literary modernism, the connections between literature and visual art, literary ecology and the environmental humanities.
 
Prof. Gosetti-Ferencei’s work explores the boundaries and connections between philosophy and literature, poetic experience and cognition, and the relevance for ecology of imagination and literary thought. In On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life (Oxford University Press, 2020), Gosetti-Ferencei presents a new interpretation of existentialist thought and literature, exploring, beyond the existentialism of the French phenomenologists, its historical origins in nineteenth century German, Danish, and Russian thought, contributions to existentialism of African-American thinkers, and its relevance for social and environmental challenges of the twenty-first century. Her book Imagination: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2023) presents the history of the philosophy of imagination along with an assessment of its multimodal nature, of its role in cognitive evolution, and of its importance to perception, knowledge, and creativity. Gosetti-Ferencei’s previous book The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World (Columbia University Press, 2018), is grounded in philosophy along with insights drawn from cognitive theory, evolutionary anthropology, aesthetics and literary theory, and offers a new theory of imagination as both emerging from the wider cognitive ecology of our embodied life and engagement with the world, and affording its transformation and transcendence. In contrast to a long tradition of philosophy that sequestered imagination from cognition proper, Gosetti-Ferencei demonstrates how imagination can best be understood as multimodal, shaping our ordinary experience and affording the heightened manifestations of creativity in scientific discovery and artistic and literary creation. Among other accomplishments of the book is the development of an understanding of cognitive play (drawing from Kant, Schiller, Nietzsche, and Husserl), which affords the ‘situated transcendence’ of creativity, and in so doing both relies upon, and diverges from, the operations of ordinary thinking. This expansive and probing account of imagination demonstrates its reach across human experience and its crucial role in shaping and transforming our relationship to the world. Previous works include Exotic Spaces in German Modernism (Oxford University Press 2011), in which Gosetti-Ferencei illuminates the construction of the ‘exotic’ in modern German literature and its consequences for the modern self and its relation to a foreign other, sometimes exploiting, otherwise destabilizing, colonialist or Eurocentric assumptions.  In this book are engaged the prose works of major German writers including Hofmannsthal, Zweig, Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Brecht, along with lesser-known writers, and the work sets forth the philosophical foundations for modern literary challenges to the self in European modernity. Reflection on the quotidian, or the everyday, in literature, art, and phenomenology comprises the subject of The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature (Pennsylvania State University Press 2007), which won an Outstanding Academic Title award from the American Library Association. Gosetti-Ferencei there demonstrates analogous structures of reflection in phenomenology, modern literature and visual art, in their respective defamiliarizations from everyday experiences in search of the ecstatic. Her work engages the philosophical thought of Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein, along with literary works by Rilke, Proust, Ponge, Sartre and the visual art of Morandi, Twombly, and Cézanne, among others. In her book Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language (Fordham University Press 2004), Gosetti-Ferencei reconstructs Hölderlin’s fragmentary poetic theory, and his theoretical and poetic responses to the ideas of Kant, Fichte and Schiller, in order to critically address Heidegger’s interpretations of the poet and their political entanglements. She demonstrates that Hölderlin’s poetics, while inspired by Enlightenment ideals, supports a theory of poetic subjectivity both tragic and analeptic in nature, a model which at once structures a reverent human relationship with nature and evades the problematic ontology of Heidegger’s notion of the history of Being. 
 
Prof. Gosetti-Ferencei's major research projects in progress concern phenomenological ecology, nature and ecology in modern literary thought, and the role of imagination in literary experience.