2018 GSA Panels

Heterodox Thinking: Goethe and the Invention of Philosophical ConceptsGerman Studies Association ConferencePittsburgh, 27-30 September 2018

This series of four GSNA-sponsored panels has been organized by Clark Muenzer. It launches the lexicon of Goethe’s philosophical concepts that Clark first announced at the 2017 Atkins Goethe Conference, and promises to be a milestone event. See the invitation to participate in the project here.Signature ConceptsFriday 10:30-12:15 (Grand Ballroom 3)Moderator: Michael Lipkin (Columbia University)Commentator: Michael Saman (New York University)

1. Sebastian Meixner (Universität Zürich)Urphänomen
2. Andree Hahmann (University of Pennsylvania)Dialektik 
3. Margaret Strair (University of Pennsylvania)Gefühl, Empfindung, Einbildung

Concepts and Theories of LanguageSaturday 10:30-12:15 (Grand Ballroom 2)Moderator: Margaretmary Daley (Case Western Reserve University)Commentator: John McCarthy (Vanderbilt University)

1. Dennis Johannssen (Brown University)Schrift/Writing
2. Clark Muenzer (University of Pittsburgh)Begriff
3. John H.  Smith (University of California, Irvine)Geist and Buchstabe

Concepts and ProsodySaturday 4:15-6:00 (Grand Ballroom 2)Moderator: Jan Oliver Jost-Fritz (East Tennessee State University)Commentator: Horst Lange (University of Central Arkansas)

1. Simon Friedland (University of Chicago)Blank Verse
2. Karin Schutjer (University of Oklahoma)Distich
3. Charlotte Lee (University of Cambridge)Iambics

Surprising ConceptsSunday 12:30-2:15 (Grand Ballroom 2)Moderator: Robert Norton (University of Notre Dame)Commentator: Alice Kuzniar (University of Waterloo)

1. Christian Weber (Florida State University)Wunderlich, Unheimlich, Ungeheuerlich
2. Jennifer Caisley (University of Cambridge)Gipfel
3. Jane Brown (University of Washington)Irrlichtilieren  

2019 MLA Panel

Goethe’s International Relations: Imagining the Ausland, 1770-1832Modern Language Association Convention3-6 January 2019, Chicago

Organizer: Joseph D. O'Neil (University of Kentucky)Presider: John H. Smith (University of California, Irvine)

1. Chunjie Zhang (University of California, Davis)“Voltaire’s The Orphan of China (1753) and Schiller’s Turandot (1801)”
2. Julie Koehler (Wayne State University)“Frau Holle Defeats King Arthur: A Conflict of Cultural Values in Naubert’s ‘Der kurze Mantel’”
3. Joseph D. O'Neil (University of Kentucky)“Goethe with Sade? Principles of Republican Narratology”

From the Editor of the Book Series

Our big news is that we’re awaiting the arrival of two superb new volumes, both slated to come out in February 2019.Odysseys of Recognition:  Performing Intersubjectivity in Homer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, and KleistBy Ellwood Wiggins (University of Washington, Seattle)www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/odysseys-of-recognition/9781684480371Literary recognition is a technical term for a climactic plot device. Odysseys of Recognition claims that interpersonal recognition is constituted by performance, and brings performance theory into dialogue with poetics, politics, and philosophy. By observing Odysseus figures from Homer to Kleist, Ellwood Wiggins offers an alternative to conventional intellectual histories that situate the invention of the interior self in modernity. Through strategic readings of Aristotle, this elegantly written, innovative study recovers an understanding of interpersonal recognition that has become strange and counterintuitive. Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey offers a model for agency in ethical knowledge that has a lot to teach us today. Early modern and eighteenth-century characters, meanwhile, discover themselves not deep within an impenetrable self, but in the interpersonal space between people in the world. Recognition, Wiggins contends, is the moment in which epistemology and ethics coincide: in which what we know becomes manifest in what we do.AndPretexts for Writing:  German Romantic Prefaces, Literature, and PhilosophyBy Seán M. Williams (University of Sheffield, UK)www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/pretexts-for-writing/9781684480524Around 1800, print culture became a particularly rich source for metaphors about thinking as well as writing, nowhere more so than in the German tradition of Dichter und Denker. Goethe, Jean Paul, and Hegel (among many others) used the preface in order to reflect on the problems of writing itself, and its interpretation. If Sterne teaches us that a material book enables mind games as much as it gives expression to them, the Germans made these games more theoretical still. Weaving in authors from Antiquity to Agamben, Williams shows how European–and, above all, German–Romanticism was a watershed in the history of the preface. The playful, paradoxical strategies that Romantic writers invented are later played out in continental philosophy, and in post-Structuralist literature. The preface is a prompt for playful thinking with texts, as much as it is conventionally the prosaic product of such an exercise.As always, we’re eager to hear about your proposals, whether a single-authored monograph or a collection of essays. With Bucknell’s new publishing partnership with Rutgers, the series is now more attractive than ever.  Cover prices have come way down:  both of our forthcoming volumes are priced at $34.95 for the paperback edition.  So if you’re at the GSA please come by the cash bar to chat.  We hope to have books and flyers on display.

Karin SchutjerUniversity of Oklahoma

From the Yearbook Editors

Volume 26 of the Goethe Yearbook features a special section on Goethe’s narrative events, edited by Fritz Breithaupt, with contributions from Christopher Chiasson, “Much Ado about Nothing? The Absence of Events in Die Wahlverwandtschaften”; Christian P. Weber, “Narrating (Against) the Uncanny in Goethe’s ‘Ballade’”; and Lisa Anderson, “Countering Catastrophe: Goethe’s Novelle in the Aftershock of Heinrich von Kleist.” This issue also showcases work presented at the 2017 Atkins Goethe Conference (Re-Orientations around Goethe), hosted at Penn State, including presentations by Eva Geulen on morphology and W. Daniel Wilson on the Goethe Society of Weimar in the Third Reich. The volume has a range of articles by emerging and established scholars on Klopstock, Schiller, Goethe and objects, dark green ecology, and texts of the Goethezeit and beyond through the lens of world literature.As always, we welcome manuscripts on any and all aspects of Goethe, his contemporaries, and the 18th century broadly conceived, including the century’s legacy. We also are interested in broadening the discussion, in organizing special sections, and experimenting with new forms and genres of scholarly writing. Please contact us with any and all suggestions at editors@goethesociety.org!Note that the Goethe Yearbook is a double-blind, peer-reviewed publication, widely indexed, and published with DOIs. All manuscripts should be prepared in MS Word, and in accordance with the Yearbook’s style sheet – published on our web site – and anonymized for review. Manuscript submissions should be no longer than 8,500 words.

Patricia Anne SimpsonUniversity of Nebraska

Birgit TautzBowdoin College

New Books by Members

Wilson, W. Daniel. Der Faustische Pakt. Goethe und die Goethe-Gesellschaft im Dritten Reich. München: dtv, 2018.

Goethes Leben ist so reich dokumentiert, sein Leben so vielschichtig, dass er leicht von allen möglichen Meinungsmachern vereinnahmt werden konnte. Für die Goethe-Gesellschaft etwa, 1885 in Weimar gegründet, war er schon vor der „Machtergreifung“ 1933 weniger der aufgeklärte Humanist als vielmehr der konservative Nationalist, danach transportierte sie das Bild eines betont „braunen“ Goethe noch vehementer. Schließlich wurde der Olympier breitspurig für Regimezwecke eingespannt. Die Privilegien einer vorgesehenen „Weltmission“, gepaart mit zunehmenden Verstrickungen, ergeben eine spannende dramatische Kurve.www.dtv.de/buch/w-daniel-wilson-der-faustische-pakt-28166/Prof. Dr. W. Daniel Wilson, gebürtiger Amerikaner, ist Professor of German an der University of London. Er hat diverse Veröffentlichungen zu Goethe vorgelegt, in wissenschaftlichen Verlagen, aber auch bei dtv: Das Goethe-Tabu. Protest und Menschenrechte im klassischen Weimar (1999).