New Books by Members

Tautz, Birgit. Translating the World: Toward a New History of German Literature Around 1800. Max Kade German-American Research Institute Series. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018.

From the publisher:In Translating the World, Birgit Tautz provides a new narrative of German literary history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Departing from dominant modes of thought regarding the nexus of literary and national imagination, she examines this intersection through the lens of Germany’s emerging global networks and how they were rendered in two very different German cities: Hamburg and Weimar.German literary history has tended to employ a conceptual framework that emphasizes the nation or idealized citizenry; yet the experiences of readers in eighteenth-century German cities existed within the context of their local environments, in which daily life occurred and writers such as Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe worked. Hamburg, a flourishing literary city in the late eighteenth century, was eventually relegated to the margins of German historiography, while Weimar, then a small town with an insular worldview, would become mythologized for not only its literary history but its centrality in national German culture. By interrogating the histories of and texts associated with these cities, Tautz shows how literary styles and genres are born of local, rather than national, interaction with the world. Her examination of how texts intersect and interact reveals how they shape and transform the urban cultural landscape as they are translated and move throughout the world.A fresh, elegant exploration of literary translation, discursive shifts, and global cultural changes, Translating the World is an exciting new story of eighteenth-century German culture and its relationship to expanding global networks that will especially interest scholars of comparative literature, German studies, and literary history.Find Translating the World here, and take 30% off with code BT17 when you order through psupress.org.

From the Book Review Editor

As always, I encourage you to let me know if there are particular areas of research that you are interested in reviewing for the Goethe Yearbook. Please send books for review and suggestions for books for review to:Professor Sean FranzelDepartment of German and Russian StudiesUniversity of Missouri428 Strickland HallColumbia MO, 65211Telephone: (573) 882-4328Fax: (573) 884-8456franzels@missouri.edu

Call for Papers: MLA 2019

Goethe's International Relations: Imagining the Ausland 1770-1832

This panel welcomes papers on all aspects of the national/international, foreign/domestic, heimisch/fremd/unheimlich border in the age of Goethe, for example: representations of migration, wandering, displacement, and exile; comparative literary relations and world literature; the international or trans-regional reputation of and influences on Goethe or other figures of the age; foreignness, abroad or extimate; Orientalism and cosmopolitanism; border crossings and homecomings; translation and rewriting of or by Goethe and others across national and linguistic boundaries in that period.Please send 250-word abstracts to Joseph O’Neil (joseph.oneil@uky.edu) by March 20, 2018.

2016 Richard Sussman Prize

We are pleased to announce the 2016 winner of the Richard Susan Prize for the best essay published on Goethe’s contributions to the sciences and on Goethe in the history of science. (See a list of previous award winners here.)Jocelyn Holland, “Observing Neutrality C. 1800,” Goethe Yearbook 23 (2016): 41-57. This is a disciplined, far-reaching investigation into the concept of neutrality in three disciplines: science, politics, and literature. Scientific discussions of neutral, that is, non-acidic or basic, chemicals connect here with political debates and reshape future readings of Goethe’s insistence on avoiding prejudices. Jocelyn’s work on “neutrality” or “Unparteilichkeit” has also given us tremendous literary insights into Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre, especially the schöne Seele, but still more widely expands into other works.

2016 Essay Prize

This year, we were again in the fortunate position to be able to award two prizes for the Goethe Society Prize. Here are our two best essays on Goethe or the Goethezeit published in 2016, with congratulations to both authors! (See a list of previous award winners here.).Gabrielle Bersier, “‘Hamiltonian-Hendelian’ Mimoplastics and Tableau of the Underworld: The Visual Aesthetics of Goethe’s 1815 Proserpina Production.” Goethe Yearbook 23 (2016): 171-94.This essay pays fascinating and innovative attention to the visual aspects of the underworld monologue in the rather understudied play Proserpina. Bersier elegantly illuminates the transformation in the play from static pantomime (à la Emma Hamilton and her attitudes) to dance, and its overturning of former collaborator Böttiger’s Christian priorities for the art, thus providing a move into what she calls the proto-cinematic development of pantomime. She thereby also sheds new light on Goethe’s theater productions through his ongoing interest in mimoplastics and tableaux vivants.Bryan Klausmeyer, “Fragmenting Fragments: Jean Paul’s Poetics of the Small in “Meine Miszellen.” Monatshefte 108.4 (Winter 2016): 485-509.Bryan Klausmeyer’s scintillating article on Jean Paul and the genre of the miscellany convinced us that genre here is not a fixed genre but rather inherently a genre of non-genre producing monstrous or hybrid possibilities that exceed even the Romantic tendency to Gesamtkunstwerke as fragments. We also appreciated the careful attention this article paid both to the materiality of writing and to small or minor forms (countering Jean Paul’s reputation as an author of excruciatingly long novels). Minor forms are often underappreciated because they defy canon, yet as Bryan shows, anticipate modern tendencies such as serialization.