Bernstein, Susan

Susan Bernstein

Professor of Comparative Literature, Professor of German Studies

Overview

Susan Bernstein works in German, French and English and American literature of the 18th-20th centuries. She has particular interests in literary theory, literature and the arts, Romanticism, philosophy and poetry. Bernstein received her doctorate from the Johns Hopkins University, her B.A. from Yale and M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. She has published articles on Nietzsche, Kant, Heine, Shelley, Derrida and others. She is the author of Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century: Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt and Baudelaire (Stanford University Press, 1998); Housing Problems: Writing and Architecture in Goethe, Walpole, Freud and Heidegger (Stanford University Press, 2008); and The Other Synaesthesia (SUNY Press, 2023). She is the co-translator, with Peter Fenves and Kevin McLaughlin, of Walter Benjamin, On Goethe (Stanford University Press, 2025). Bernstein began teaching at Brown in 1989.

Brown Affiliations

Research

Research Overview

Susan Bernstein works in German, French, and English and American literature of the 18th through 20th centuries. She has particular interests in literary theory, literature and the arts (specifically music and architecture), Romanticism, philosophy, and poetry.

Research Statement

Susan Bernstein's interests extend to the history of literary theory and western aesthetics, lyric poetry in the European tradition, the Bildungsroman, Romanticism, phenomenology and poetry, and individual topics such as the uncanny, irony, and Romantic genre theory. Her book, Virtuosity of the 19th Century: Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt and Baudelaire , examines the reflexive relationship between performance of music and language. She is also the author of Housing Problems: Writing and Architecture in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger , published in 2008; and The Other Synaesthesia, 2023.

Funded Research

Fulbright Senior Scholar Award, spring 2005 ($10,000)

Wriston Course Development Grant, summer 2003 ($1,500)

Wayland Collegium Grant, course development, summer 2003 ($2,000)

Salomon Research Award, Brown University, 1998 ($15,000)

Small Grants Fund Award, Brown University (to support summer research in Germany), 1997, 1998 ($2,000)

Wayland Collegium Grant (with Karen Newman), 1994 ($2,500)

Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship, 1994 (one semester paid leave)

Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (stipend for research in Germany), 1993 ($3,000)

Scholarly Work

Books:

Virtuosity of theNineteenth Century: Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt and Baudelaire. Stanford University Press, 1989.

Housing Problems: Writing and Architecture in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger. Stanford University Press, 2008.

The Other Synaesthesia. SUNY Press, 2023.

On Goethe, by Walter Benjamin. Ed. and trans. Susan Bernstein, Peter Fenves and Kevin McLaughlin. Stanford University Press, 2025.

Book Chapters and articles:

"La Lucinde de Friedrich Schlegel et l'absolu littéraire." La littérature sans condition. Ed. Isabelle

Alfandary. Le Bord de l’Eau: Lormont, France, 2020.

"Nietzsche et Wagner et la communicabilité démonique." L'énigme Nietzsche. Ed. Isabelle

Alfandary and Marc Golschmidt. Editions Manucius, Paris, France, 2019.

“The philía of Philology.” Give the Word - Responses to Werner Hamacher's 95 Theses on

Philology. Ed. Gerhard Richter and Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019.

“The Other Synaesthesia.” Points of Departure: Samuel Weber Between Spectrality and Reading, ed. Peter Fenves, Kevin McLaughlin, and Marc Redfield. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016.

“Intensely Speaking.” Ed. Aris Fioretis, Babel – für Werner Hamacher. Basel: Urs Engeler Editor,

2009. 41-48.

“Conference Call: Ronell, Heidegger, Oppen." Ed. Diane Davis, Reading Ronell. Urbana and

Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009. 49-59.

“It Walks: the Ambulatory Uncanny.” Ed. Simon Morgan-Wortham and Gary Hall, Experimenting –

Essays with Samuel Weber. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. 183-208.

“Liszt, Franz.” Europe. 1789-1914. New York: Scribner and Sons, 2006.

“Correspondances – Between Baudelaire and Heidegger.” Modern Language Notes 130, no. 3 (April

2015): 607-622.

“Bells and Spells – Gothic Repetition and Romantic Redundancy.” Differences 21, no. 3 (fall 2010):

53-72.

“The Dome of the Mind: Monticello in Weimar.” MLN 123, no. 5 (December 2008): 981-1005.

“Memory Text: Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1940-2007).” October 122 (fall 2007): 121-127.

"The Gift of Metaphor." differences 16, no. 3 (fall 2005): 76-87.

"Heine's Harzreise." in A New History of German Literature. Ed. David Wellbery. Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 2005.

"On Music Framed: the Eolian Harp in Romantic Writing," in: ed. Phyllis Weliver, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Significance of Music, Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain Series, gen. ed. Bennett Zon. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005.

"It Walks: the Ambulatory Uncanny." MLN 118, no. 5 (December 2003): 1111-1139

"Q - or, Heine's Romanticism." Studies in Romanticism 42, no. 3 (fall 2003): 369-391.

Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb, Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W.H. Auden. MLN 118, no. 5 (December 2003): 1317-1323.

"(Re)Viewing Stupidity, by Avital Ronell." Review Article. differences 13, no. 3 (fall 2002): 143-160.

"Goethe's Architectonic: Bildung and Buildings in Classical Weimar." MLN, December 1999.

Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century - Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt and Baudelaire. Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1998

"Imagine (Kant)." Germanic Review 72, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 108-118.

"In Formel: 'Wagner und Liszt.'" New German Critique 69 (Fall 1996): 85-97.

"Re-re-re-reading Jena." MLN, 110 (1995): 834-855.

"Journalism and German Identity: Communiqués from Heine, Wagner and Adorno." New German Critique 66 (Fall 1995): 65-93.

Thomas Schestag, Parerga and para-. MLN 109.3. (April 1994): 567-573.

"Fear of Music? Nietzsche's Double Vision of the 'Musical-Feminine.'" Nietzsche and the Feminine. Ed. Peter Burgard. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994. 104-132

"Wagner and Heine: Geographical Margins of the Musical German Heimat." MLA Annual Convention, 1992.

Translation: Werner Hamacher, "Lectio - De Man's Imperative." In Reading De Man Reading. Ed. Wlad Godzich and Lindsay Waters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 171-201.

Translation: Odo Marquard, "Indicted and Exonerated Man in 18th Century Philosophy." Farewell to Matters of Principle: Philosophical Studies. Ed. Vincent Descombes and Josué Harari. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Translation: Klossowski, Pierre. "Between Marx and Fourier." In On Walter Benjamin - Critical Essays and Recollections. Ed. Gary Smith. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988. 367-370.

Béatrice Didier, La Musique des Lumières. MLN 101.4 (1986): 959-965.

Background

Education and Training

Year	Degree	Institution
1991	PhD	The Johns Hopkins University
1983	MA	University of California, Berkeley
1979	BA	Yale University

Honors and Awards

Pembroke Center Faculty Fellow, Brown University, 2019-20.
Faculty Fellow, Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University, Spring 2017.
Edwin and Shirley Seave Faculty Fellow, the Pembroke Center, Brown University, 2014-15.
The John Rowe Workman Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Humanities, May, 2013.
Fulbright Senior Scholar Award, spring 2005
Wriston Course Development Grant, summer 2003
Wayland Collegium Grant, course development, summer 2003
Visiting Scholar, American Academy in Rome, May 2000
Salomon Research Award, Brown University, 1998
Small Grants Fund Award, Brown University (to support summer research in Germany), 1997, 1998
Wayland Collegium Grant (with Karen Newman), 1994
Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship, 1994
Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (stipend for research in Germany), 1993
Owen Fellowship, Johns Hopkins University, 1984-86
Regents' Intern Fellowship, University of California at Berkeley, 1981-84
Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (stipend for study in Berlin), 1979-80

Researchers@Brown