FERRIS, David S. 1954-

PERSONAL:

Born 1954, in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of Comparative Literature, University of Colorado at Boulder, 331 UCB, Ketchum Bldg., Rm. 233, Boulder, CO 80302. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Educator and writer. Yale University, New Haven, CT, professor of English and comparative literature; City University of New York, professor of comparative literature, German, and English at graduate school, and professor of comparative literature at Queen's College; University of Colorado at Boulder, professor of comparative language and humanities.

WRITINGS:

Theory and the Evasion of History, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1993.

(Editor and contributor) Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 1996.

Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 2000.

(Editor) The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS:

In his first book, Theory and Evasion of History, David S. Ferris produced "a study of the changing relationships between literature and criticism, between literary theory and literary history, between criticism and history, and thus finally between literature and history," noted Roger Blood in Modern Language Notes. The study focuses on portions of literary works such as poet William Wordsworth's Prelude and novelist George Eliot's Middlemarch, as well as philosophical writings of Aristotle and Plato. In the process, Ferris "draws on considerable erudition" and a "wide command of contemporary literary-theoretical issues," stated Wendell V. Harris in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Jeremy Tambling, discussing Theory and the Evasion of History in the Modern Language Review, hailed it as "exemplary and subtle deconstruction." Blood praised the scholar's effort as well, noting that "Ferris's most important theoretical contributions reside in his patent fidelity to the complicated, proleptic, and metaleptic structures of inference in intralinguistic analysis, and his refined sense of the self-contradictory nature of all linguistic concepts."

Ferris edited and contributed an essay to Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions, a collection of papers given at a 1991 Yale University conference centered on Benjamin's relationship to literary theory. Benjamin is known primarily as an early-twentieth-century German philosopher deeply influenced by the writings of Karl Marx. The essays focus on "language and the origin of the work of art," noted Tambling. Ferris's own contribution to the volume discusses Benjamin's work in relation to history. And according to Susan Wilson in Notes and Queries, Ferris's essay "is certainly the most provoking, probably the most ambitious" in the collection.

In Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity Ferris discusses how Greece developed in the eighteenth century as an icon of culture in which concepts of individuality, freedom, history and modernity are all reconciled. Much of the book is written in reference to Johan Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art. Ferris argues that Winckelmann's historical account of Greece is crucially important to the subsequent understanding of culture and what it is to be modern. Writing in Modern Philology, Jennifer Wallace stated: "[Ferris] maintains that historians have been guilty either of idealizing ancient Greece and emphasizing its beauty or of mercilessly debunking its mystique and eschewing its aesthetic in favor of a politicized or historicized picture. Instead, he argues, critics should explore the historical processes by which the aesthetic account of Greece came to predominate in the late eighteenth century and thus reach an understanding of the connections between aesthetics and history in our culture today." To study the different aspects of Winckelmann's conceptualization of culture, Ferris discusses numerous works, including those by Keats, Schelling, Aeschylus, Shelley, and Hölderlin.

Wallace found that Ferris's focus on Winckelmann and other German writers made "his book very abstract" but noted, "If Silent Urns provokes a new edition of Winckelmann in English, it will have done a good service." Criticism contributor Daniel P. Watkins noted, "Silent Urns is a difficult, complex, and challenging book that requires considerable intellectual stamina from the reader." Watkins also commented that "Ferris seeks to recover a notion of the aesthetic that ideological criticism too often rejects, while holding on to a history that is represented in the aesthetic object." The reviewer then added, "While his argument is difficult, it is also compelling, and it warrants careful study insofar as it offers the possibility of reinvigorating studies in Romanticism at a moment when ideological criticism appears to be losing much of its force."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Criticism, spring, 2001, Daniel P. Watkins, review of Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellinism, Modernity, p. 263.

Modern Language Notes, December, 1994, Roger Blood, review of Theory and the Evasion of History, pp. 981-986.

Modern Language Review, January, 1995, Jeremy Tambling, review of Theory and the Evasion of History, pp. 123-125; April, 1999, Jeremy Tambling, review of Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions, pp. 486-487.

Modern Philology, May, 2004, Jennifer Wallace, review of Silent Urns, p. 630.

Nineteenth-Century Literature, June, 1994, Wendell V. Harris, review of Theory and the Evasion of History, p. 107.

Notes and Queries, December, 1997, Susan Wilson, review of Walter Benjamin, p. 578.

Reference & Research Book News, November, 1993, review of Theory and the Evasion of History, p. 43.

World Literature Today, summer, 1997, David S. Gross, review of Walter Benjamin, p. 662.