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Heine’s Aesthetics of Dissonance - Colloquium with Willi Goetschel

Heine's resolute move towards a pointedly dissonant prose and poetry is “consonant” with his larger project of rethinking the function of art, literature, and the role of critique. Heine's provocative play with dissonance signals the critical transition to a new attitude with regard to aesthetics and poetic practice, an attitude whose emancipatory impulse defies the classic canon of beauty replacing it with a notion of diversity that defines the experience of the modern with a pointed celebration of dissonance.

Willi Goetschel is professor of German and Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Constituting Critique: Kant’s Writing as Critical Praxis, Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine and The Discipline of Philosophy and the Invention of Modern Jewish Thought.