David Roberts (academic)


David Gordon John Roberts is an Australian professor of German studies. He was awarded a Ph.D. at Monash University in 1968, supervised by Leslie Bodi.
His main areas of research are modern German literature, socio-aesthetics of literature and the arts, and the aesthetic theory and cultural history of European modernism.

Awards

Editorial activities

  • Co-editor Thesis Eleven. Critical Theory and Historical Sociology 1983-
  • International Advisory Board, Germanistik 1987-
  • International Editorial Board, The German Quarterly 1988-1994
  • Co-editor, “Monash European Studies”, Berg Publishers, Oxford/New York/Hamburg, 1988–1993
  • International Advisory Board, “Studies in Contemporary German Literature”, Stauffenburg, Tübingen, 1997–2002
  • Advisory Board, ''Limbus. Australian Yearbook of German Literary and Cultural Studies''

Publications

Artistic Consciousness and Political Conscience: The Novels of Heinrich Mann 1900-1938. Bern, Lang, 1971Kopf und Welt: Elias Canettis Roman “Die Blendung”. München, Hanser Verlag, 1975 The Indirections of Desire. Hamlet in Goethes Wilhelm Meister. Heidelberg, Carl Winter Verlag, 1980 . Reissued as paperback 2005
  • * See review article: Max Pensky, “Choosing Your Mask”, New German Critique 63, 161-180Dialectic of Romanticism. A Critique of Modernism. With Peter Murphy, London: Continuum, 2004Canetti's Counter-Image of Society. Crowds, Power, Transformation. With Johann P. Arnason, 'Rochester, N.Y., Camden House, 2004.The Total Work of Art in European Modernism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011 See review article: Roger Fornoff, ‘At the Interface of Art, Religion, Politics‘, Thesis Eleven 123, 123–128.History of the Present: The Contemporary and its Culture. London, Routledge, 2021.Science Fiction and Narrative Form. With Andrew Milner and Peter Murphy, London, Bloomsbury, 2023.