Connected by the Ear: The Media, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Romantic Lecture by Sean Franzel (review)

Every reader of this journal has sat through them – experiencing sometimes higher, sometimes lower levels of excitement. Many have given them – more or less successfully. For me personally, they were a substantial draw into academia when I attended them as a young student and found them mostly incomprehensible (if greatly attractive) in a Romantic way. I am speaking of lectures, given within and outside of the university. They have been and still are a defining part of academic life, formalized in slightly different ways in the German and Anglo-American context. Major steps of scholarly success are marked by the performance of public lectures: from dissertation defences through inaugural addresses to laudations. To be a scholar means to write in solitude and to speak in public.

Sean Franzel’s book presents thought-provoking insights into the history of this practice of lecturing in Germany while offering connections to today’s educational issues. He traces the roots of the current form to Romanticism and points out the crucial functions lecturing has been fulfilling in the specifically German practice of Wissenschaft. After the end of the eighteenth century the objective of a German national culture was pursued on a multitude of levels: overtly political attempts at creating a public stage for German patriotism were accompanied by the seemingly apolitical collection of fairy tales and folk songs, but all of these activities became part of scholarly pursuits and ultimately lectures at the new type of university celebrating Bildung as “a national-political event” (5). In the process of academic modernization public lectures became a “key point of reference in subsequent debates about public, pedagogical, and political speech” (215). The model of pedagogy developed and idealized during Romanticism has influenced the German understanding of education as well as the policies governing it until today. The recent major structural changes of the Bologna reforms, directed at equalization of European educational models – but in Germany often perceived as overly bureaucratic – have revived a nostalgia for the Romantic legacy of “Humboldtian” principles, which, as Franzel shows, may have been from the start “little more than a fiction” (150). This fiction, though, does not seem to lose its appeal, partly because it was rooted in a successful practice of lecturing critically embedded in society before the new “Humboldtian” university was even installed.

Where Kant in his essay exploring the question of enlightenment had famously insisted on the differentiation between the public and private use of reason, the Romantic lecture installs a performative act in which academic and political goals become conflated. In his teaching practice, Kant never seems to have questioned the view of the absolutist state, for which professors were civil servants responsible for training the future personnel of that same state. Only the pedagogy expressed in his writings aimed at independence and autonomy. His declared goal to instruct students not to “learn philosophy” but to “learn to philosophize” (43) laid the critical foundations not only for Romanticism but for the age of modern scholarship more generally. Kant’s own teaching, though, wasn’t affected by this revolutionary demand. In his university lectures he used – just like his colleagues – approved compendia that served “as a material reminder of state-sanctioned doctrines” (39). Only “privately” was he formulating the provocative process of turning students into “autonomous subjects capable of original, self-standing critical thought” (10). The critical Romantic subject, founded on these Kantian principles, then idealized the possibilities of genuine dialogue as performed in a lecture. In this perfected view as the fulfillment of Kant’s mandate of critical engagement, the Romantic lecture produced original thought, and the resulting dialogue produced autonomous subjects. Franzel in his mission of “casting a critical eye upon assertions of scholarly communication’s essential egalitarianism” (172) reveals the dialogical ideal to be largely fictitious but simultaneously underscores the pivotal role of this fiction in the...