GSNA prize-winning essays awarded in October 2020 for essays published in 2019.
Presented by Heather I. Sullivan at the October 2020 GSNA business meeting with thanks to fellow committee members and readers, Sue Gustafson and Joe O’Neill.
The top awards come with a cash prize. Please join us in celebrating these four authors and their wonderful essays!
Richard Sussman essay prize in Science
Andrea Meyertholen, "Zum ersten Mal sah ich ein Bild" Goethe's Cognitive Viewing Subject as Scientist and Artist" in Seminar 55.3 (2019), 203-228.
Meyertholen’s essay cogently illuminates Goethe’s theories of perception in his essay, “Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt.” Building on a wide array of the existing scholarship on this famous essay, she opens—with panache—a new horizon outlining Goethe's focus on the importance of spectators' cognitive and subjective viewing, which, she claims, allows later artists like Kandinsky to develop startling ideas in abstract art. Reinterpreting Goethe’s essay, Meyertholen demonstrates how Goethe’s call for viewers to allow objects to appear in their own apparently “natural order” actually opens up a gap of subjective and abstract connections that can also describe Kandinsky’s encounter with Monet’s work. Indeed, Meyertholen adds rich nuance to our study of the importance of perception in Goethe's scientific works and how his focus on the creative cognitive process of the viewing subject was crucial for the emergence of abstract art. In our era of grappling with scientific perception and its radical reshaping of the world alongside debates on the role of aesthetic thinking, we are much enriched by Meyertholen’s insights into human subjects, subjectivity, and aesthetic possibilities in cognition.
GSNA ESSAY PRIZE
Daniel Nolan, "'I too am Naked': Kleist, Habermas, and the Epigrammatic Exposure of Literary Honesty" in the German Studies Review 42.1 (2019): 19-36
In his luminous essay, Nolan describes the epigrams of Goethe and Kleist as stylized confessions presenting claims of sincerity and textual honesty. According to Nolan, “the author’s relation to truth and their capacity for penetrating insight appears as a moment of privacy” that occurs in the very public form of epigrams in the newly developing literary marketplace. Importantly, Nolan posits that Kleist’s epigrams “point to a corrective response to Habermas’s broader claims that aesthetic thinking can be characterized primarily in terms of its reliance on stable forms of truthfulness” (my emphasis). Nolan thereby revisits and reshapes Habermas’s theory of the emerging “public authorship” showing us that Goethe plays with honesty and self-performance, while Kleist “undermines the notion that truthfulness provides a stable frame for evaluating aesthetic works.” Such insights are invaluable today as our experiences with confessional forms of “public truths and sincerity” yet again are in wild transition in the media and marketplace.e
Anna-Lisa Baumeister, "'Sie scheint auch mehr zu donnern und blitzen, als zu reden.' Zur Meteorologisierung der Sprache im Drama der 1770er Jahre" in The Germanic Review 94.3 (2019): 209-227.
Baumeister brilliantly reshapes readings of aesthetic thinking, in this case with her close study of the idea of “wettern” in German drama of the 1770s by Goethe, Klinger, Lenz, and Herder. Instead of following traditional readings of weather and storms in dramas that look to religious and rhetorical origins or allegorical function of individual events, Baumeister takes the newly more scientific discourse of weather in the era seriously in relation to the power of words. She reads “wettern” literally in terms of the “then-emerging meteorological science, whose hallmark is the synthesis of formerly separate phenomena (e.g., lightning, clouds, sunlight, storms) into a continuous process with a unified internal dynamic.” This united dynamic, when enacted on the stage, translates into greater potential for the power of poetic and aesthetic language (a la Herder). Aided by technological theatrics incorporating the formally divine power to drive thunder and lightning into a systematic, semi-natural unity, poetic language and aesthetic performance are themselves transformed into a newly dynamic kind of power.
Honoroable Mention – W. Daniel Wilson, "'Global Mission': The Goethe Society of Weimar in the Third Reich" in the Goethe Yearbook 26 (2019): 21-37.
Wilson’s impressively-researched exploration of the Goethe Society of Weimar's archives provides a detailed outline of the Society’s concessions to the Third Reich and its antidemocratic and antisemitic leadership during that time. While attempting to maintain status, the Weimar group sought National Socialist support while also hoping to keep, at least initially, international participation of wealthy Jewish members especially in the United States. Wilson demonstrates clearly “that the Goethe Society had a privileged place in the Third Reich,” due to its “reinterpretation of Goethe as a precursor to the Third Reich.” Able to maintain an illusion of autonomy based on the cultural capital of Goethe and its “global mission,” the Weimar Goethe Society “performed a sort of Selbstgleichschaltung” by incorporating National Socialist ideology in its publications. Wilson’s documentation of this dark era provides new insights into academic power struggles in times of dire political chaos.