We mourn the death of Goethe Yearbook coeditor Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge. Despite serious blows to her health over the last two and a half years since her diagnosis with breast cancer, and a dispiriting prognosis, Sarah was determined to participate fully in scholarly life and was an equal partner in the production of this volume, as well as the two previous volumes, 31 (2024) and 32 (2025). She often expressed how important it was for her to continue working on the Goethe Yearbook, and she continued to read submissions, correspond with authors, and consult about editorial issues through the last months and even weeks of her life. Possessing an intellect both imaginative and precise, Sarah was, in my view, the ideal coeditor, knowledgeable in many areas and having the insight to recognize when to call on others’ expertise, generous with her ideas and suggestions while maintaining high standards and ideals of scholarship, committed to mentoring authors, particularly graduate students and those just starting out in our profession, with the goal of helping them to produce their best work.
Sarah published distinguished research on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literature, addressing a wide array of authors and topics. In 2020, she was awarded the Goethe Society of North America Essay Prize for her article “Karl Phillip Moritz as Cognitive Narratologist: Travel Writing, Visualization, and Literary Experience,” published in the Lessing Yearbook XLVII (2020). Sarah coedited, with C. Allen Speight, the volume Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship” and Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2020), and is the author of two monographs, Novel Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel 1795–1830 (Camden House, 2016), and Composite Selves: Subjecthood in the German Novel, 1700–1795 (Oxford University Press), whose publication date coincides with the date of her death. She completed revisions to that final book under near-impossible circumstances, while undergoing chemotherapy treatments and with the knowledge that her life would soon end.
Sarah’s scholarship emphasizes the importance of communities and of families, both biological and nonbiological, in forming the individual, and her dedication to researching, writing, and supporting other’s work, even as her illness progressed, reflects her commitment to our scholarly “family.” Her publications and editorial work, in turn, have helped to shape our profession in ways both visible and intangible. We grieve her death and celebrate what she has left behind, her writings and the memory of her fortitude and unwavering dedication to the scholarly enterprise.
--Eleanor ter Horst
From the Goethe Yearbook Editors
Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge and Eleanor ter Horst
This 33rd volume of the Goethe Yearbook is our third as coeditors of the journal and, at the midpoint of our editorship, we wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on our experiences and discuss with other editors of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century journals the scholarly trends that they have observed, as well as the challenges and opportunities of editing a pre-twentieth-century journal. The result is the “Editors’ Roundtable” that appears in this volume. We are fortunate to have received contributions from a wide variety of journal editors, truly a multidisciplinary and international group. Among the diverse perspectives represented, there are also agreements about emerging scholarly trends and the importance of scholarship on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century topics. Currently, in the United States, where universities are being pressured to capitulate to political demands, where humanistic inquiry is increasingly devalued,and where our democratic institutions are under siege, a reexamination of eighteenth-century literary and philosophical trends, which form the foundation of modern universities and democratic societies, seems evermore crucial. We hope that the contents of the current volume, produced at a challenging moment for us as editors and for the broader scholarly community, will attest to the vivacity and continued relevance of scholarship on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century topics.
The first article in this volume, Donald Wehrs’s “Aesthetic Healing of Divisiveness or Evasion of Politics in Goethe’s Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten,” addresses the question of whether the arts can serve as an antidote to political extremism and the social divisions that it engenders. Goethe’s novella, set during the French Revolution and engaging diverse perspectives on that conflict, enables, according to Wehrs, a debate about whether aesthetic education provides a solution to political divisions or simply an escape from such conflicts. Xuxu Song’s “Ancient Greek Idyll Fragments, Translation, and Outline Illustrations: Sympoesie and Symphilosophie in the Athenaeum (1798-1800)” offers another perspective on aesthetics and sociability, as it explores how the journal as a whole creates community across languages, art forms, and eras through aesthetic practices such as collections of classical idylls, translation, and illustrations of poetry. Luke Rylander’s essay “Do Witches Belong in the Kitchen? The Gender Economy of the “Hexenküche” in Goethe’s Faust” explores the intersection of gendered discourses with economic structures in this crucial scene of Goethe’s drama. Rylander concludes that the scene offers alternatives to profit-driven, gender-normative societal constructions by emphasizing pleasure-focused relationships and a play-oriented economy, establishing “a genuine countermodel to patriarchal capitalism.” Jeffrey Jarzomb’s “Fact, Fiction, and Volk: Prescription and Action in Engel Christine Westphalen’s Charlotte Corday,” examines the depiction of the Volk in Westphalen’s drama as an easily misled entity with a potential for violence. Jarzomb shows how this depiction, through a reversal of history, places the blame for the Terror on the Jacobin leader, Jean-Paul Marat, and strips the Volk of any potential for collective action. Taken together, these four articles explore links between aesthetic creativity, collectivity, and sociability that have continuing resonance today.
A further contribution to the scholarship of this period consists of two original manuscripts by E.T.A. Hoffmann, which Dennis Schäfer discovered in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. In an introduction, Schäfer explains the provenance and relevance of these manuscripts from the final section of Hoffmann’s Brief des Kapellmeisters Kreisler an den Baron Wallborn. Schäfer also provides a facsimile of the manuscripts, a transcription, and a translation.
This volume’s Forum section, titled “Inclinations: Männerfreundschaften/Frauenfreundschaften,” emerged from an international fellowship program and subsequent conference organized by Imke Meyer, Heidi Schlipphacke, and Sigrid Nieberle. The contributions by Heidi Schlippacke, Helmut Puff, Sigrid Nieberle, Sophie Salvo, Wolfgang Bunzel, and Imke Meyer explore same-sex male and female friendships and relationships as depicted in literature, letters, music, and philosophical dialogue through the notion of Neigungen (inclinations), a term encompassing homosocial, homoerotic, and homosexual bonds and presenting alternatives to our twentieth- and twenty-first-century categories of friendship and desire.
Taken together, the intellectual offerings of this issue invite us to consider our realities, past and present, as well as possible alternatives—political and aesthetic—for the future.
GSNA response to Bucknell University Press Closure
In this letter to Provost Wendy Sternberg of Bucknell University, GSNA President Heidi Schlipphacke and John B. Lyon, editor of the book series New Studies in the Age of Goethe, express their concern about the announced closure of Bucknell University Press.
If you would like to lend your support to this letter, please fill out the form below.
Note that your email address will not be shared and is for verification purposes only.
Signatories thus far:
GSNA Supports “Inclinations" conference in Essen.
CFP: Atkins
Goethe's Welt/ Welten
The Atkins Goethe Conference
November 7-9, 2024
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX
Faust declares in the scene “Vor dem Tor” that he has two souls living in his breast, one of which is holding fast to “the world,” “Die eine hält, in derber Liebeslust, / Sich an der Welt…” (“The one holds fast with joyous earthly lust, /Onto the world…”), while the other soul wants to fly away. Faust also complains earlier of his desire to know “was die Welt Im Innersten zusammenhält” (“what holds the core of the world together”). These versions of “world” reflect a kind of materiality, yet also potentially an idealist or spiritual sensibility; they also suggest a sense of the vast cosmos as a scale for the human writ large, or even a political and cosmopolitan perspective on power. The historical context for Goethe’s Faust, however, was the era when explorers, botanists, colonizers, and slave traders were traveling around the world and depicting these experiences in various versions of global travels, as a Reise um die Welt, (Alexander von Humboldt; the Forsters, Adelbert von Chamisso, among others). We find in their accounts wildly different usages of the scalar, spatial, and categorical term “Welt/world,” as well as usages of the term in literary, geographical, philosophical, scientific, social, anthropological, and other discourses inflected by racist, gendered, and colonial views during this era of expansion, travel, industrialization, and increasingly destructive human activities (in environmental terms). How, then, do we contextualize Hegel’s “Weltgeist,” and Schelling’s “objektive Welt,” Goethe’s “Weltliteratur,” or Schiller’s rejection of “Weltgeschichte” in favor of the still broader term, “Universalgeschichte” in his famous 1789 inaugural lecture at the University of Jena in terms of the various meanings of “Welt”/world in this era? Furthermore, how do the categorical designations of Innenwelt, Frauenwelt, Kinderwelt, or Pflanzenwelt pertain to world as a kind of scale in this era at the beginning of the world-changing cultural and environmental practices of the Anthropocene that radically shift global powers and the sense of planetary scale?
The 2024 Atkins conference topic centers arounds concepts of Welt/en-World/s with the questions of how the human (and non-human) relationship to the “world” is portrayed; whether “Welt” is understood to be material or otherwise; and whether it is the world around us as UmWELT, or as cosmopolitan expanse and colonial space for imperialism. On the one hand, such a focus on “Welt” reveals an awareness of the limitations of parochial perspectives and an interest in forging broader networks and understandings; and, on the other hand, “Welt” points to an array of categories plagued by dualisms or racist, sexist, and classist connotations as the Europeans experience or imagine other peoples, other places, other species, and other forms of knowledge. Conceptions of “world/s” might resonate in terms of, or in contrast to, the planet, globalism, nation, continent, “nature,” or realms that designate gender, class, race, psychological states, etc. The GSNA welcomes abstracts that look at the wide array of meanings of (the) world/s, on any scale or for any categories, during Goethe’s lifetime.
Send questions to Heather I. Sullivan, hsulliva@trinity.edu
Send abstracts by March 1, 2024 of no more than 350 words to both Chunjie Zhang and Matthew Birkhold: chjzhang@ucdavis.edu and birkhold.22@osu.edu with the subject line Atkins 2024.