Ernst Behler (4 September 1928 in
Essen
Essen (; Latin: ''Assindia'') is the central and, after Dortmund, second-largest city of the Ruhr, the largest urban area in Germany. Its population of makes it the fourth-largest city of North Rhine-Westphalia after Cologne, Düsseldorf and D ...
– 16 September 1997 in
Seattle
Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...
) was a German philosopher. In 1976 he became the founding Chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at the
University of Washington
The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington.
Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...
in Seattle. His research included
Friedrich von Schlegel,
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (; or ; 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, prose poet, cultural critic, philologist, and composer whose work has exerted a profound influence on contemporary philosophy. He began his ...
and the early
Romanticism
Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate ...
. Also notable are his books on
irony
Irony (), in its broadest sense, is the juxtaposition of what on the surface appears to be the case and what is actually the case or to be expected; it is an important rhetorical device and literary technique.
Irony can be categorized into ...
:
Irony and the discourse of modernity' (1990)
''Klassische Ironie, romantische Ironie, tragische Ironie''(1972), ''Ironie und literarische Moderne'' (1997).
1928 births
1997 deaths
Writers from Essen
Academic staff of the University of Bonn
University of Washington faculty
University of Washington Department of German faculty
20th-century German philosophers
Scholars of modern philosophy
German male writers
German expatriates in the United States
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