Lionel Gossman (born 1929) is a Scottish-American scholar of French literature. He taught Romance Languages at Johns Hopkins University and Princeton University, and has written extensively on the history, theory and practice of historiography, ^[1] and more recently, on aspects of German cultural history. ^[2]

Biography

Gossman was born in Glasgow, Scotland and educated in public schools in the city, and during World War II, the surrounding countryside. ^[3] In 1951, he graduated with an M.A. (Hons.) degree in French and German literature from the University of Glasgow. ^[4] In 1952, he obtained the Diplôme d'Études Supérieures at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, and wrote his thesis "The Idea of the Golden Age in Le Roman de la Rose." ^[5]

From 1952-1954, Gossman served in the Royal Navy where he was trained to be a simultaneous English-Russian translator. ^[6] Upon completion of national service in 1954, he entered the then newly-founded St. Antony's College, the first exclusively graduate college of Oxford University. In 1958 he completed a doctoral dissertation on scholarly research and writing on the Middle Ages during the French Enlightenment ("The World and Work of La Curne de Sainte-Palaye"). ^[7]

After a brief stint as Assistant Lecturer at the University of Glasgow (1957-1958), Gossman accepted a teaching position in the Department of Romance Languages at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He rose through the ranks, becoming professor in 1966, head of the French section of the Department in 1968, and chair in 1975. Gossman says he was fortunate to have as colleagues and friends in those years René Girard, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Lucien Goldmann, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Serres and Louis Marin. ^[8] Gossman recalls in his autobiography:

It was a time of enormous intellectual ferment, much of it the work of French thinkers and writers […]. As phenomenology and existentialism were challenged by structuralism and structuralism in turn by " post-structuralism," we in the French section of the Romance Languages Department found ourselves in the role of mediators between our colleagues in the other disciplines and the French maîtres penseurs to whom we had direct access and whose aura illuminated us too to some extent. Curious physicists and puzzled English professors looked respectfully to us to provide explanations of the latest trends. French in those years was an extraordinarily lively discipline at the very center of the Humanities. ^[9]

In 1976, Gossman moved to Princeton University, where he spent 23 "calm, happy, productive and personally and intellectually fulfilling years." He served on key university committees, and from 1991-1996 chaired the Romance Languages Department. In 1990 he received Princeton’s Howard T. Berhman Award for distinguished service in the humanities. ^[10]

In 1991 he was made an Officer in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques; in 1996, he was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society; and in 2005 he received an honorary degree of Doctor of Humanities from Princeton University. ^[11] Gossman has also served on the editorial boards of The Johns Hopkins University Press, the Princeton University Press and the American Philosophical Society. ^[12]

Since retiring in 1999, Gossman has resumed his undergraduate studies of German culture. He has written a number of articles on aspects of 19th century German art and cultural politics, including several studies of the Nazarene movement. ^[13] On the Nazarenes, he has authored the study "Unwilling Moderns: The Nazarene Painters of the Nineteenth Century" ^[14] and the book "The Making of a Romantic Icon: The Religious Context of Friedrich Overbeck’s 'Italia und Germania.'" ^[15]

Selected Bibliography

Along with articles on a wide range of topics, as of April 2010 Gossman has published 14 books. Here are summaries and reviews of some of his best-known books:

• Orpheus Philologus: Bachofen versus Mommsen on the Study of Antiquity (1983) (ISBN 9781422374672)

Though the great German classical scholar Theodor Mommsen was probably unaware of it, he was the object of the passionate and enduring hatred of J. J. Bachofen, an obscure Swiss philologist in the provincial city of Basle. Bachofen, not well known in the English-speaking world, is mentioned by anthropologists for for his contribution to the popular 19th-century theory of " matriarchy," and by classicists such as George Derwent Thomson for his contributions to the study of Greek myth and tragedy. ^[16] Arnaldo Momigliano writes in The Journal of Modern History:

Gossman's monograph, penetrating and well informed […] will help enormously to place Bachofen in his time and to indicate his interest for our time. Gossman sees him as the lonely heir of a previous generation and tradition […] whose philological interpretation of individual texts had been characterized by a deep suspicion of the modernization of ancient views and by a predisposition to an intuitive global understanding of the wisdom of classical and preclassical stories. ^[17]

• Towards a Rational Historiography (1989) (ISBN 9780871690005)

Gossman maintains that underlying the argument that historiography cannot be subsumed under a poetics or a rhetoric is a larger claim, namely that a wide range of activities, from literary criticism, through legal debate, theology, ethics, politics, psychology, and medicine to the natural sciences, all constitute rational practices, even if there is considerable variation in the degree of formalism and rigor and in the type of argument most commonly employed in each of these different of fields of inquiry.

Hence Gossman emphasizes the practice or process of doing history rather than the product. What appeals to him in the idea of reason as a practice is its open, liberal, and democratic character. Historiography as a rational practice supposes a community of participants rather than the “anomie” of a world in which every man is his own historian that appears to be implied by privileging the historical “text.” ^[18] Edward Berenson writes in his book "The Trial of Madame Caillaux:"

Unlike many recent critics of historians and historical practice, especially those influenced by French literary theory, Gossman grounds his discussion in a solid sense of what historians 'actually do', not just when they write their narratives but when they perform their research, integrate and evaluate the work of others, revise and reconceptualize their scholarship in the face of new evidence and critical scrutiny. ^[19]

• Between History and Literature (1990) (ISBN 9780674068155)

Drawing on English, German and French scholarship, the essays in this volume illuminate the many facets of the problematic relationship between history and literature and shows how each discipline both challenges and undermines the other’s absolutist pretensions. ^[20] Includes Gossman's seminal study on French historian Augustin Thierry ("Augustin Thierry and Liberal Historiography") ^[21] and two important essays on French historian Jules Michelet. Ceri Crossley writes in the journal French History:

This book contains some of the best work done on the French Romantic historians since the 1960s. Three of the essays collected here are necessary reading for all who investigate the work of the nineteenth-century French historians. The other essays address broader issues, educational and philosophical […]. These essays teach us much about the roles played by the historian and literary critic in the making and remaking of culture. ^[22]

• Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (2000) (ISBN 9780226305004)

After co-teaching with Carl Schorske an undergraduate seminar on the civic culture of 19th century Basel, Switzerland, Gossman worked on this book for 20 years. Gossman argues that the peculiar, somewhat anachronistic political and social structure of Basel made it a favorable haven for “untimely” ideas that challenged the positivism and optimistic progressivism of the time: the philosophy of Nietzsche, the historiography of Bachofen and Burckhardt, and the theology of Franz Overbeck. ^[23] Awarded the American Historical Association's 2001 George L. Mosse Prize for an outstanding work on the intellectual and cultural history of Europe since the Renaissance. ^[24] John R. Hinde writes in the American Historical Review:

Gossman's book, a product of many years of active contemplation, is a tour de force. It is at once an intellectual history, a cultural history of Basel and Europe, and an important contribution to the study of nineteenth-century historiography. Written with a grace and elegance that many aspire to, few seldom achieve, this is model scholarship. ^[25]

• The Making of a Romantic Icon: The Religious Context of Friedrich Overbeck’s 'Italia und Germania' (2007) (ISBN 9780871699756)

Gossman focuses on Johann Friedrich Overbeck’s painting “Italia and Germania” to discuss the importance of religious conversion in Romantic thought. This book serves as a thoughtful introduction to the way of thinking of one of the most important of the Nazarene movement painters. It treats the evolution of the Nazarene artists’ preoccupation with religious issues in an engaging manner and offers a social-historical and theological context to Overbeck’s painting. ^[26] Won the American Philosophical Society’s 2007 John Frederick Lewis Award for best book or monograph. ^[27]

• Brownshirt Princess: A Study of the 'Nazi Conscience' (2009) (ISBN 9781906924065)

Marie Adelheid, Prinzessin Reuß-zur Lippe, was a rebellious young woman and aspiring writer from an ancient princely family who became a fervent Nazi. Heinrich Vogeler was a well-regarded Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) artist who joined the German Communist Party and later emigrated to the Soviet Union. Ludwig Roselius was a successful Bremen businessman who had made a fortune from his invention of decaffeinated coffee.

What was it about the revolutionary climate following Germany's defeat in World War I that induced three such different personalities to collaborate in the production of a slim volume of poetry - entitled Gott in mir (God In Me) - about the indwelling of the divine within the human? Gossman's study provides insight into the sources and character of the "Nazi Conscience." ^[28]

• Future Books (2010 and Beyond)

Expanding on his paper "Liebe Genossin: Hermynia Zur Mühlen: A Writer of Courage and Conviction" ^[29] and his journal article "The Red Countess: Four Stories," ^[30] Gossman has prepared a new English translation, with abundant notes and introduction, of a 1929 autobiographical memoir by Austrian princess Hermynia Zur Mühlen, who placed her literary talent in the service of socialism and the struggle against Nazism and anti-Semitism. Expected to be published in late 2010 by Open Book Publishers.

Gossman is currently working on a study of Heinrich Vogeler, a successful turn-of-the century German artist and illustrator and a friend of the poet Rilke. Gossman is interested in Vogeler’s transformation from a dandy and aesthete in the years before World War I into a left-wing anarchist and then Communist in the years following the war, and in his dogged, ultimately unsuccessful search for an artistic form appropriate to his changed convictions and worldview. ^[31]

Complete Bibliography

• Men and Masks A Study of Molière (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963) ^[32]
• Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment: The World and Work of La Curne de Sainte-Palaye (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968) ^[33]
• French Society and Culture: Background to Eighteenth Century Literature (Prentice Hall, 1973) (ISBN 9780133312980)
• The Empire Unpossess'd: An Essay on Gibbon's Decline and Fall (Cambridge University Press, 1981; new ed. 2009) (ISBN 9780521234535; ISBN 9780521103459)
• Orpheus Philologus: Bachofen versus Mommsen on the Study of Antiquity (American Philosophical Society, Transactions 73:5, 1983) (ISBN 9781422374672)
• Towards a Rational Historiography (American Philosophical Society, Transactions 79:5, 1989) (ISBN 9780871690005)
• Between History and Literature (Harvard University Press, 1990) (ISBN 9780674068155)
• Geneva-Zurich-Basel: History, Culture, and National Identity (Princeton University Press, 1994) (ISBN 9780691036182)
• Building a Profession: Autobiographical Reflections on the History of Comparative Literature in the United States (Edited, with Mihai Spariosu; State University of New York Press, 1994) (ISBN 9780791417997)
• Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas / Basel in der Zeit Jacob Burckhardts: Eine Stadt und vier unzeitgemässe Denker (University of Chicago Press, 2000 / Schwabe, 2006) (ISBN 9780226305004 / ISBN 9783796521577)
• Begegnungen mit Jacob Burckhardt: Vorträge in Basel und Princeton zum hundertsten Todestag (Encounters with Jacob Burckhardt; Edited with Andreas Cesana; Schwabe, 2004) (ISBN 9783796518096)
• The Making of a Romantic Icon: The Religious Context of Friedrich Overbeck’s “Italia und Germania” (American Philosophical Society, Transactions 97:5, 2007) (ISBN 9780871699756)
• Brownshirt Princess. A Study of the “Nazi Conscience” (Open Book Publishers, 2009) (ISBN 9781906924065)

Notes

References

• "CV." Gossman, Jeffrey Lionel. Princeton University, 2009. [24]

• Gossman, Lionel. "The Idea of Europe." Princeton University Courseware, 1997. [25]

• Gossman, Lionel. "In the Footsteps of Giants: My Itinerary from Glasgow to Princeton." Princeton University, 2000. Gossman Papers, American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia, PA.

• Gossman, Lionel. "Works on the Web." Princeton University, 2002. [26]

• "Lionel Gossman." Princeton University: Department of French and Italian, 2008. [27]

ORIGINAL

educated at Glasgow (M.A.Hons. in French and German), Paris (Diplôme d’études supérieures, with a thesis, directed by Jean Frappier, on “L’Idée de l’Age d’Or dans Le Roman de la Rose”), and Oxford (D.Phil. dissertation on medieval studies in the eighteenth century, directed by Jean Seznec), Gossman came to the U.S in 1958 as Assistant Professor of French in the Department of Romance Languages at Johns Hopkins. He rose through the ranks, becoming Professor in 1966 and Chair in 1975. It was a time of great intellectual ferment at Hopkins and Gossman was fortunate to have as colleagues and friends in those years Jacques Derrida, René Girard, Lucien Goldmann, Jean-François Lyotard, Louis Marin, and Michel Serres.

His first book, Men and Masks: A Study of Molière (Baltimore, 1963), was written under the influence of Girard. It was extremely successful, went through many printings, and remained in print until very recently. With his second, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment: The World and Work of La Curne de Sainte-Palaye (Baltimore, 1968), a revision of his D.Phil. thesis, Gossman reverted to the more scholarly approach of his mentors, Frappier and Seznec, as well as to an earlier interest in the history, theory, and practice of historiography. He followed this quite specialized study with French Society and Culture: Background to Eighteenth Century Literature (Englewood Cliffs: 1973), written at the invitation of the textbook publisher Prentice-Hall and intended primarily for use by undergraduate students. This little work nevertheless took up two themes that have consistently interested Gossman: how history influences literature and literature influences history, and the relation between literature and historiography.

In 1976, at the urging of his friend, the medievalist Karl D. Uitti, Gossman accepted an appointment at Princeton. As at Hopkins, he regularly taught seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature. He also continued to offer graduate and undergraduate courses on the writing of history and published several books on the topic: Augustin Thierry and Liberal Historiography (Middletown, CT, 1976), The Empire Unpossess'd: An Essay on Gibbon's Decline and Fall (Cambridge, 1981, reissued 2009), Orpheus Philologus: Bachofen versus Mommsen on the Study of Antiquity (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983), Toward a Rational Historiography (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society,1989), Between History and Literature (Cambridge, MA, 1990). Over the years Gossman has gradually abandoned his earlier emphasis -- in opposition to the naïve positivism of many traditional historians -- on the literary and esthetic patterns structuring historical narratives in favor of a view of historiography as close to legal argument, in that it is based on evidence and plausibility and subject to criticism and review, rather than either a mirror image of reality or a purely imaginative construction made up of elements conventionally classified as “historical.”

An undergraduate seminar co-taught in the European Cultural Studies Program at Princeton with historian Carl Schorske resulted in Basel in the Age of Burckhardt (Chicago, 2000; German transl. 2006), which was awarded the American Historical Association’s George L. Mosse prize. In this work Gossman argues that the peculiar, somewhat anachronistic political and social structure of the Swiss city of Basel in the nineteenth century made it a favorable haven for “untimely” ideas that challenged the positivism and optimistic progressivism of the time: the philosophy of Nietzsche, the historiography of Bachofen and Burckhard, and the theology of Franz Overbeck. Since retiring in 1999, Gossman has resumed his undergraduate studies of German culture. He has written a number of articles on aspects of nineteenth-century German art and cultural politics, including several studies of the Nazarene painters, a rebellious group of German artists, once internationally celebrated and influential and now largely forgotten outside Germany. The Nazarenes sought to abandon what they considered the wrong path taken by art since the Renaissance and to return to an earlier practice of art and an earlier conception of its function. The focus of Gossman’s interest was, on the one hand, the Nazarenes’ own “untimely” view and practice of art and, on the other, the role of modern museums and of art history in shaping the sensibility of the public and determining what kind of art it will respond to. In The Making of a Romantic Icon: The Religious Context of Friedrich Overbeck’s “Italia und Germania,” which was published by the American Philosophical Society in 2007 and was won the Society’s John Frederick Lewis Award for that year, Gossman turned his attention to a painting by a leading Nazarene artist which is still well-known in Germany. He proposed a new interpretation of it based on the many preparatory sketches for it by Overbeck and his close friend Franz Pforr and on the importance for the Nazarene painters of religious conversion, spiritual renewal, and brotherly love as the condition of the creation of art as they understood it.

Gossman is currently working on a study of Heinrich Vogeler, a successful turn-of-the century German artist and illustrator and a friend of the poet Rilke. Vogeler was transformed by the experience of the First World War from a dandy and aesthete into a left-wing anarchist and finally a committed Communist. He emigrated to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and died there in 1942. Gossman is interested in Vogeler’s dogged, ultimately unsuccessful search for an artistic form appropriate to his changed convictions and worldview. This research has resulted so far in two studies of writers whose work Vogeler illustrated. Brownshirt Princess (Cambridge, 2009) is about a rebellious German aristocrat who subsequently developed into a fervent Nazi and used her literary talent to promote National Socialism, even after 1945. A forthcoming critical edition, in a new English translation, of an autobiographical memoir by an Austrian countess who, in the same period, became a Communist and devoted her considerable literary talent to the cause of socialism and the struggle against National Socialism and anti-Semitism, is intended to revive awareness of a literary corpus Gossman considers unjustly neglected, of high quality, and of great interest to cultural historians and students of women’s history (The End and the Beginning: A Memoir of the Years 1883 to 1917, by Herminia Zur Mühlen, expected publication date 2010).

Gossman has served on the editorial boards of the Johns Hopkins University Press, the Princeton University Press, and several scholarly journals, as well as on various committees of the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and, since 1997, the American Philosophical Society, to membership of which he was elected in 1996. In 1990 he was a recipient of Princeton’s Howard T. Berhman Award for distinguished service in the humanities; in 1991 he was made an Officier in the order of the Palmes Académiques; and in 2005 he received an honorary degree of Doctor of Humanities from Princeton University.

Gossman served on the editorial boards of the Johns Hopkins University Press (1967-76) and the Princeton University Press (1982-87), as well as on the boards of various scholarly journals (Comparative Literature, Eighteenth Century Studies, Clio, French Forum). In the late 1960s, I was a member of the selection committee of a Ford Foundation program designed to encourage more black Americans to pursue graduate studies. From 1978 until 1982 I was humanities representative on the selection committee of the Social Sciences Research Council. At Princeton, I was twice elected to two-year terms on the so-called Committee of Three (the Committee on Appointments and Advancements), one of the most important committees in the University. (p30)

, M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Romance Languages emeritus

Links:

Gossman, Lionel. "Unwilling Moderns: The Nazarene Painters of the Nineteenth Century." Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide. 2.3 (Autumn 2003). http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=273:unwilling-moderns-the-nazarene-painters-of-the-nineteenth-century&catid=73:autumn03article&Itemid=84

Gossman, Lionel. "Liebe Genossin: Hermynia Zur Mühlen: a Writer of Courage and Conviction." http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/muhlen/gossman.html

http://www.princeton.edu/~lgossman/webwork.htm

http://www.princeton.edu/~images/courseware/audio/gossman/lionelgossman.html http://tigernet.princeton.edu/Education/nazarenes.asp

http://www.openbookpublishers.com/product.php/18/1/brownshirt-princess---a-study-of-the--nazi-conscience----paperback-edition/a4c18da648a097cef0cdb59bc48b0030