Overview
Emir is a doctoral candidate in the program with his project entitled The Social Sublime: The Aesthetics of Anticipation, Reconciliation, and Modern Life. In this project, he challenges existing views about the shortcomings of realist prose in nineteenth-century Germany by arguing for a unique, reflective capacity among the texts of the period to imagine the totality of our social world. Drawing on Kant’s reflective judgment of the sublime, he argues that German realism represents modernity by teasing literary sensibility with fragmentary sightings of a social whole. These sightings, then, he claims, arouse the reader into imaginative labor where the totality of modern life is produced in aesthetic judgment.
Currently a DAAD fellow at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin, Emir's work has been supported by the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Free University in Berlin and the Cornell Institute for European Studies. Outside of his work on German realism, Emir is interested in aesthetic cognition and the question concerning the epistemic standpoint of fiction and narration over other ways in which we make knowledge claims about the world. His goal is to incorporate his analysis of literary texts into a comprehensive perspective on the paramount role of fiction in shaping humanity's self-understanding—an idea often attributed to philosophical discourse as the pinnacle of self-consciousness since Hegel's aesthetics. In addition to his work on German literature, Emir has also published projects on ethics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of history.
Publications
“Reconciling Hegel with the Dialectic: Islam and the Fate of Muslims in Hegel’s Philosophy of History” - co-authored with Zeyad el Nabolsy, Hegel Bulletin 45.1, 93-119.
“Hegel and Nietzsche on Self-Judgment, Self-Mastery, and the Right to One’s Life” - Nietzsche-Studien 52.1, 148-170, 2023.
“Disenchantment as Reenchantment and the Genesis of the Pöbel in Gottfried Keller’s Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe (1856)” - The German Quarterly 95.3, 293-308, 2022.
“Dialectical Abnormality? Jewish Alienation and Jewish Emancipation between Hegel and Marx” - Naharaim: Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History 16.1, 79-100, 2022.