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Ekbert Faas
Born	Germany
Era	20th century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Analytic, Nietzschean
Main interests	Aesthetics Cognitive Science Evolutionary Theory · Poetry · Modernity

Background

After becoming a full professor of English Literature in 1972, Ekbert Faas left his native country to restart his literary career in North America. In this he concentrated on poets such as Ted Hughes, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson and Robert Bly, to name a few, while also continuing his previous academic labors in studies of tragedy, Shakespeare’s Poetics, and the beginnings of psychiatry in relation to the Victorian dramatic monologue. At the same time he explored new fields such as biography and the novel. Highly praised for all these efforts, his first novel Woyzeck’s Head earned him special accolades by being compared to the accomplishments of notables such as Vladimir Nabokov, Julian Barnes, Tom Stoppard, and Renaissance novelist Grimmelshausen. He has continued these novelistic efforts since. A more recent scholarly interest has been the theory of beauty and art in relation to cognitive science and evolutionary theory. An inveterate traveler, Faas hitchhiked throughout Europe and North Africa in his early to mid-teens, and has kept up his globetrotting ever since. His diaries, started at age fifteen and as of last counting, covering one hundred and forty-nine volumes, have served him as a major quarry in his creative endeavors.

Major Publications

A novelist (Woyzeck’s Head, 1991; The Terrorist, forthcoming), literary critic (Ted Hughes, 1983; Tragedy and After. Euripides, Shakespeare, Goethe, 1986), biographer (Robert Duncan, 1983; Robert Creeley, 2001), and interdisciplinary scholar (Victorian Poetry and the Rise of Psychiatry, 1988), Ekbert Faas has had a lifelong interest in poetics (Towards a New American Poetics, 1979; Shakespeare’s Poetics, 1987) and aesthetic theorizing. Faas has been published by such esteemed publishing houses as Princeton, Cambridge, McGill-Queen's, Black Sparrow, and Comorant in English, French and German.

His Genealogy of Aesthetics (Cambridge, 2002) gives a critical account of the idealist western tradition via in-depth studies of aestheticians like Plato, Augustine, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Derrida, from a Nietzschean and simultaneously neo-Darwinian perspective. For the last dozen years he has been evolving a new aesthetics based on up-to-date cognitive science and evolutionary theory. This recently completed study, The Survival of Beauty and Art (circa 400pp.), avoids narrow formulas like ‘art = significant form’ or ‘art is or is not adaptive’ in favor of a broad-based approach distinguishing five major categories: the affective, the sexual, the perceptual, the cognitive, and the cultural. The aesthetic, on this view, is a sense shared by humans and non-humans, while art forms part of a larger realm of the artefactual or what Karl Popper called “World Three.” Meanwhile, his chapters on cognitive and cultural aesthetics emphasize the deep divide between the non-human and human.

Selected Books

• Poesie als Psychogramm, Die dramatisch-monologische Versdichtung im viktorianschen Zeitalter. Fink Verlag (1974)
• Offene Formen, Zur Entstehung einer neuen Asthetik. Goldmann Verlag (1975)
• Towards a New American Poetics: Essays and Interviews : Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Robert *Creeley, Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg. Black Sparrow Press (1978)
• Ted Hughes : The Unaccommodated Universe: With Selected Critical Writings by Ted Hughes and Two Interviews. Black Sparrow Press (Sep 1 1980)
• Young Robert Duncan: Portrait of the Poet as Homosexual in Society. Black Sparrow Books; (Feb 1 1984)
• Shakespeare’s Poetics. Cambridge University Press (Mar 1986)
• Tragedy and After: Euripides, Shakespeare, Goethe. McGill-Queen's University Press (Nov 1 1986)
• Irving Layton and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, 1953-1978. McGill-Queen's University Press (Jun 1 1990)
• Retreat into the Mind: Victorian Poetry and the Rise of Psychiatry. Princeton Univ Press (March 1991)
• Woyzeck’s Head. Cormorant Books (1991)
• Robert Creeley: A Biography. McGill-Queen's University Press (July 9 2001)
• The Genealogy of Aesthetics. Cambridge University Press (Sep 16 2002)

In German:

• Offene Formen, Zur Entstehung einer neuen Asthetik. Goldmann Verlag (1975)
• Poesie als Psychogramm, Die dramatisch-monologische Versdichtung im viktorianschen Zeitalter. Fink Verlag (1974)

External links

• example.com