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.

Courses taught by Professor Gosetti-Ferencei include:

 

Environmental Humanities

Phenomenology and Literature

Critical Ecologies of Literary Modernism

Philosophical Aesthetics and Literary Aesthetics

Reflections on Modernity

German Literary Modernism

Nature and Ecology in Modern German Thought 

Existentialism in Literature and Philosophy

Kafka in Philosophical and Literary Perspective

Nietzsche and Literature

Philosophy of Art

Literature and Visual Art

Philosophy of Imagination

Animals and Animality in Literature and Philosophy

Literary Geographies: Environment, Space, and Place in Literature

Continental Philosophy in the 19th century

Continental Philosophy in the 20th Century

Imagination: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).

 

On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

 

The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

 

Exotic Spaces in German Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007).

Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). 

 

 

After the Palace Burns (Lincoln, NE: Zoo Press, 2004). The Paris Review Prize in Poetry.

 

Martin Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Fritsch and Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).

 

 

Modern Language Notes (MLN) Special Issue, Drinking from Two Glasses: Hölderlin at 250 and Celan at 100, Volume 135 Issue 3 (2020).

 

 

“Ecopoetics and the Exigencies of Poetic Dwelling,” Symposium on Dichtung, Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual 13 (2023).

“The Modernist Mimetic Imagination,” andererseits – Yearbook of Transatlantic German Studies, Volume 11/12 (2022/23).

“Towards an Existentialist Ecology,” MLN (Modern Language Notes), Comparative Literature Issue, Vol. 137 No. 5, (December 2022).

 

“Uncertainty, Realism, and the Self in Kafka,” in From the Enlightenment to Modernism: Three Centuries of German Literature, ed. Carolin Duttlinger, K. F. Hilliard, and Charlie Louth (Oxford: Legenda, 2021).

 

“Existentialism and The Future of Humanity” (1930 words) in Arts & Ideas, Issue 94 (10 February 2021).

 

“The Phenomenology of Poetry,” in Language and Phenomenology, ed. Chad Engelland (London and New York: Routledge, 2020).

 

“Nature and Poetic Consciousness from Hölderlin to Rilke,” in Harmonisch entgegengesetzt: Hölderlin’s Philosophy of Nature, ed. Rochelle Tobias (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

 

“Distributed Cognition in Modern Poetry and Painting: Rilke and Cézanne,” in Distributed Cognition in Victorianism and Modernism, ed. Miranda Anderson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

 

“Editor’s Introduction: Drinking from Two Glasses: Hölderlin at 250 and Celan at 100,” Modern Language Notes, German Issue, vol. 135 no. 3 (April 2020).

 

 “On Literary Understanding,” Varieties of Understanding, ed. Stephen Grimm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

 

“Imaginative Ecology in Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus,” in Rainer Maria Rilke: Sonnets to Orpheus, ed. Hannah Eldridge and Luke Fischer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

 

“Nietzsche and Cognitive Ecology,” in Anti-Idealism, Anti-Classicism: Reinterpreting a German Discourse, ed. Juliana de Albuquerque and Gert Hoffman (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019).

 

“Language, World, and Animality: Between Derrida and Heidegger,” Understanding Derrida, Understanding Modernism, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).

 

 “On Philosophy and Poetry,” Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, ed. Barry Stocker (New York: Palgrave, 2018).

 

“Phenomenology and the Imagination of Modernism,” in Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism, ed. Ariane Mildenberg (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).

 

 “Muerte y autenticidad. Reflexiones sobre Heidegger, Rilke y Blanchot,” trans. J. Daniel González Marín, Andamios Vol. 14, no 33 (enero-abril 2017) pp. 123-148.

 

“The Imagination of Animals: Rilke, Kafka, and the Philosophy and Literature of Embodied Cognition,” in The Animal Inside: Essays at the Intersections of Philosophical Anthropology and Animal Studies,’ ed. Geoffrey Dierckxsens et al (Lantham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 2016).

 

“Radnóti, Blanchot, and the (Un)writing of Disaster,” Comparative Literature and Culture 17.2 (June 2015).

 

“The Mimetic Dimension: Literature Between Neuroscience and Phenomenology,’ British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 54, no. 4 (October 2014), 425-448.

 

 “The Tragic Dimension in Modern German Painting,’ A Companion to Tragedy in German Literature, Art, and Thought, ed. Stephen Dowden and Thomas Quinn (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014).

 

“Death and Authenticity: Reflections on Heidegger, Rilke, Blanchot,” Existenz, 9:1 (Spring 2014).            

 

“The World and Image of Poetic Language: Heidegger and Blanchot,” Continental Philosophy Review 45:2 (2012).

 

“Writing in Philosophy and the Literature and Philosophy of Writing (Plato, Mann, Blanchot)’ in Philosophy, Literature, and the Crisis of Metaphysics, ed. Sébastian Hüsch (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011).

 

“Immanent Transcendence in Rilke and Stevens,” The German Quarterly 83:3 (Summer 2010).

 

“The Poetics of World: Sources of Poetic Theory in Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religious Life,” in A Companion to Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religious Life, ed. Andre Wiercinski and Sean McGrath (Rodopi Press, 2010).

 

“Foreshadowings of the Kafkaesque in Alfred Kubin’s Drawings,” Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics vol. III, no. 4 (December 2008).

 

 “Interstitial Space in Rilke’s Short Prose Works,” The German Quarterly 80:3 (Summer 2007).

 

“The Poetics of Thinking: Heidegger and Hölderlin,” in Literature and Philosophy: A Guide to the Contemporary Debates, ed. David Rudrum, (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007).

 

 “Between Animality and Intellection: Phenomenology of the Child-Consciousness in Proust and Merleau-Ponty,” Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research vol. 93 (2007).

 

“Language and The Flesh of Being: Merleau-Ponty and Kristeva,” in Interrogating Ethics: Essays on Merleau-Ponty, edited by James Hatley (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006).                        

 

“Articulate Spontaneity and the Aesthetic Imagination,” Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, vol. 92 (2006).

 

“Moral Sentiment and the Ethics of Representation in Holocaust Literature,” Analecta Husserliana: the Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, vol. 84 (2006).

 

 “Trompe l’Oeil and the Mimetic Tradition in Aesthetics,” Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, vol. 87 (2006).

 

 “Confirmations of Life in a Phenomenology of the Poetic Image,” Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, vol. 83 (2004).                            

 

“The Aesthetic and the Poetic Image: Beyond the Ekphrastic Divide,” Philosophy Today, vol. 29 (Summer 2003).

 

“Phenomenology of the Mysterious: A Reading of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus,” Phenomenological Inquiry vol. 26 (Fall 2002).

 

“Ash in the Clouds: Unearthing Goethe,” in Literary Imagination: Review of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, 4:3 (2002).

 

“Tragedy and Truth in Heidegger and Jaspers,” International Philosophical Quarterly 42:3 (Fall 2002).

 

“Phenomenological Literature: From the Natural Attitude to ‘Recognition,’” Philosophy Today, vol. 45 (Summer 2001).

 

“The Ecstatic Quotidian: Literary Phenomenology in Sartre and Rilke,” Journal of the Association of the Interdisciplinary Study of the Arts, 7:1 (2001).

 

“Figures of the Feminine in Heidegger’s Theory of Poetic Language,” in Feminist Interpretations of Heidegger, edited by Patricia J. Huntington and Nancy Holland (College Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001).

 

“Revolutions in Language: Hölderlin to Kristeva,” International Studies in Philosophy, XXXII:1 (1999).

 

“Language and Subject in Heidegger and Kristeva,” Philosophy Today (SPEP supplement, vol.43, 1999).

 

“The Poetic Politics of Dwelling: Hölderlin, Kant, Heidegger,” International Studies in Philosophy, XXXI: 1 (1998).