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University of Pittsburgh

Robert Buch

Visiting Professor
1409 Cathedral of Learning
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
412-624-0992
buch@pitt.edu

Education

PhD, Comparative Literature, Stanford University, 2003

MA, Comparative Literature, Stanford University, 1997

Grund- und Hauptstudium, Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, FU Berlin, 1990-94.

Courses Taught

  • Vienna
  • Major Cultural Periods

Profile

The focus of Robert Buch's teaching and research is on twentieth-century literature and culture, often from a comparatist angle. His first book "The Pathos of the Real," forthcoming with Johns Hopkins University Press, focuses on the peculiar nexus between violence and the image in twentieth century aesthetics in writers and artists such as Georges Bataille, Franz Kafka, and Peter Weiss, and Francis Bacon. The study explores the tension between visual and verbal representation, the combination of the iconic and the iconoclastic, by drawing on the rhetorical notion of pathos--the idea of insurmountable suffering but also of codified affect--and the psychoanalytic notion of the real--the disruption of the symbolic order.  His two current research projects are concerned with the “gnostic impulse” in the twentieth century as well as the genealogy of short prose forms on the boundary between literature and philosophy. The former is about the preoccupation and fascination of ancient gnosticism on a number of key figures in the German-Jewish tradition, from Max Weber and Karl Barth to Hans Blumenberg and Jacob Taubes. The latter attempts to understand the connection between certain forms of aphoristic writing and anthropolgy, beginning with the tradition of the French Moralists and ending with their heirs in the twentieth century.

Publications

  • The Pathos of the Real. On the Aesthetics of Violence in the Twentieth Century (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010).
  • “Schlachtgemälde und Schlachtbeschreibung: W.G. Sebald, Claude Simon” in Weimarer Beiträge, 1/2010.
  • Guest editor (with Johannes Türk): Figures and Figurations of the (Un)Dead, special issue of Germanic Review, Vol. 82, No. 2, 2007.

Professional Membership

  • American Comparative Literatures Association
  • German Studies Association
  • Modern Language Association