Connected by the Ear: The Media, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Romantic Lecture by Sean Franzel

Abstract

Reviewed by: Connected by the Ear: The Media, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Romantic Lecture by Sean Franzel Ellwood Wiggins Connected by the Ear: The Media, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Romantic Lecture. By Sean Franzel. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013. Pp. 292. Paper $39.95. ISBN 978-0810129337. Lectures are cool again. After decades of detraction from opponents of passive learning and teacher-centered education, the lecture is experiencing a revival. Online tools, podcasting technology, and social media are allowing this authoritative, top-down mode to become a more interactive form of pedagogy. The revolution is everywhere: iTunes U allows millions to audit lecture courses from elite universities free of charge. Giving a TED Talk is a badge of success in any field. Anonymous student bloggers calling themselves the “Münkler-Watch” at the Humboldt University in Berlin have paralyzed a respected professor and created a public furor by posting what they consider objectionable comments from his classroom lectures. This rediscovered aura of the lecture hearkens back to the heyday of a similar media revolution around 1800, when the idea of education and the institution of the university were undergoing radical transformation. Sean Franzel’s book provides an insightful, engaging history of this important shift in the culture of knowledge, while always remaining critically alive to the implications for contemporary issues in media and pedagogy. It will be of high interest to historians, philosophers, and literary scholars. It tells its gripping tale in clear and accessible language that people outside the academy will appreciate. The book complements other valuable studies of the history of learning cultures, such as William Clark’s Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (2006), but in choosing to view this pivotal era through the lens of the lecture, Franzel’s monograph achieves a focus that more sprawling histories lack. This focus is by no means limiting, however, as the lecture proves to be a convergence point for the most pressing cultural and intellectual issues of romanticism. The well argued book consists of six case studies. The first three chapters outline the changing relation of scholar to the state in Kant, Karl Philip Moritz, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Chapters 4–6 then explore the “dialogic” ideal of lecturing in August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Adam Müller, and Fichte. Each of the chapters traces the development of four “inflationary concepts and/or metaphors [that] define the Romantic lecture as such” (9). These four themes distinguish the axis around 1800 from previous attitudes toward knowledge, and persist in some form today. 1) The cult of originality and the expectation that scholars should produce new knowledge were perhaps the most salient features of the era. 2) The desideratum for popularity was a particularly complex and fraught shift. Franzel convincingly ties this to an upheaval in the conceptions of public/private and shows how it imbricates and compromises the processes of national identity formation in Germany. 3) Franzel critiques the idealized metaphor of dialogue as an essential principle of the lecture. [End Page 183] 4) He also demonstrates how the ephemeral lectures were monumentalized in print and other material forms of memorialization with sometimes dire cultural and political consequences. The book’s first chapter lays out Kant’s surprising conceptions of public and private. The rest of the book shows how Kant’s romantic followers were largely responsible for our modern ideas of the dichotomy, which have become so entrenched that we now find Kant’s notions counterintuitive. For Kant, the private sphere refers to an individual’s personal duties to the state. Hence a university professor’s teaching syllabus and lecture schedule are functions of her private self. Her research agenda and publication of new knowledge, in contrast, are public concerns. Kant argued that the scholar should be entirely free and uncensored in her public person (after all, he reassured the Prussian king, the majority of people will have no desire to read or capacity to understand the technical and theoretical arguments of public discourse). In her private capacity as a teacher, however, the lecturer is bound by what the state prescribes to educate useful citizens. For this reason, Kant never disseminated his own...