Anselm Haverkamp

Anselm Haverkamp (born July 18, 1943) is a German-American professor of literature and philosophy. He received his academic education in Freiburg/Brsg, Zurich, Bonn and Konstanz. After his PhD in Heidelberg and his Habilitation in the Konstanz School of Criticism, he moved from Konstanz to Yale; since 1989 he has taught as professor of English at New York University, where he also founded the Poetics and Theory Program. Since 1994 he has served as founding member of the newly established European University Viadrina in Frankfurt an der Oder, East of Berlin. In 2009, he was made an honorary professor of philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Haverkamp was a member and co-editor of the research group Poetik und Hermeneutik in its later phase, 1979-1996. Under the influence of the Yale School of deconstruction (Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida), he developed the Konstanz School's Rezeptionsästhetik (Wolfgang Iser, Hans Robert Jauß, Wolfgang Preisendanz) from a theory of literary response (Reader-response criticism) to a theory of literary latency.[1] Relevant parts of this theory are the theory of metaphor or metaphorology, including the history of rhetoric and historical epistemology, as well as the relationship of philosophy and literature.

Main references of his work include the Poetics of Aristotle, the Rhetoric of Quintilian, the Aesthetics of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, as well as the work of Benjamin and Derrida, Hans Blumenberg and Stanley Cavell. Relevant literary authors include Ovid, Shakespeare and Keats, Hölderlin, Joyce and Beckett.

More recently, Haverkamp has extended the theory of latency into the fields of historical epistemology, art theory and legal studies. He is a regular contributor and editor of Texte zur Kunst (Berlin) und Law and Literature (Berkeley).