Kirk Wetters

Kirk Wetters is a Professor of German, who joined the Yale German department in 2004. Starting from his dissertation, which was published as The Opinion System: Impasses of the Public Sphere from Hobbes to Habermas (Fordham 2008), his work has focused on the overlapping conceptual and metaphorical foundations of modern literature and critical theory. His first book argues that the often overlooked or maligned concept of opinion played a defining role in the many divergent strands of post-Enlightenment literature and theory (philosophical epistemology, political and social theory, rhetoric, aesthetics, critique). Literary and critical authors of the German late 18^th century (especially Lichtenberg, Mendelssohn, Wieland, Forster, and Goethe), he argues, offer articulations of opinion which anticipate many theoretical claims of the 20^th century with regard to the key institutions of modern society, the possibility of democracy, and changing conditions of media, communication, and information.