Name Lionel Gossman | ||
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Books Between History and Literature, The Passion of Max Von, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, Brownshirt Princess: A Study of t, Men and masks | ||
Lionel Gossman Introduces "Thomas Annan of Glasgow"
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, and more recently, on aspects of German cultural history.
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Biography
Gossman was born in Glasgow, Scotland and educated in public schools in the city, and during World War II, the surrounding countryside. In 1951, he graduated with an M.A. (Hons.) degree in French and German literature from the University of Glasgow. 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."
From 1952-1954, Gossman served in the Royal Navy where he was trained to be a simultaneous English-Russian translator. 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").
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. 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.
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.
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. Gossman has also served on the editorial boards of The Johns Hopkins University Press, the Princeton University Press and the American Philosophical Society.
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. On the Nazarenes, he has authored the study "Unwilling Moderns: The Nazarene Painters of the Nineteenth Century" and the book "The Making of a Romantic Icon: The Religious Context of Friedrich Overbeck's 'Italia und Germania.'"