Minutes of the 2018 Business Meeting

September 29, 2018

German Studies Association Conference

Wyndham Grand Hotel, Pittsburgh

Present:

1. Catriona Macleod, Vice President

2. Daniel Purdy, President

3. Elliott Schreiber, Executive Secretary

4. Karin Schutjer, Editor, New Studies in the Age of Goethe

5. Patricia Simpson, Co-Editor, Goethe Yearbook

6. John Smith, Director-at-Large

7. Birgit Tautz, Co-Editor, Goethe Yearbook

8. Christian Weber, Secretary-Treasurer

Daniel Purdy announced the election results: Heather Sullivan (Vice President, 2019-22), Vance Byrd and Eleonor ter Horst (Directors-at-Large, 2019-22), William Carter (Secretary-Treasurer, 2019-22). 52 members voted.Catriona Macleod announced GSNA Prizes. GSNA Essay Prize: Gabriel Trop for best essay; Leif Weatherby honorary mention. Tove Holmes: Richard Sussman Essay Prize.  Discussion ensued on how best to get the word out about the Richard Sussman Essay Prize. John Smith will announce the prize at a literature and science conference in Toronto. It will continue to be announced on relevant listservs.Christian Weber distributed a summary of the GSNA budget and expenses. He noted that $48 are unaccounted for, and offered to contribute it from his own pocket, which the other members of the Executive Board rejected. He suggested that the GSNA find productive ways to spend its budget, e.g. helping to subsidize Clark Muenzer’s lexicon project. Daniel Purdy asked whether it would be worth spending approximately $70 per month for website security, and there appeared to be a consensus that this would be a good investment. Birgit Tautz suggested that funds could be appropriated for a website linked with the Goethe Yearbook for the purpose of displaying high-resolution images and figures included or referenced in Yearbook articles. She noted that it would be important to find a reliable partner (such as a publisher or educational institution) that could ensure the longevity of such a project. Karin Schutjer proposed giving a stipend to the GSNA Webmaster and Newsletter editor.

Christian noted strong membership numbers. About 50% have elected a 3-year membership. As an aid to recruiting more members, Christian suggested that a list of contributors to the Goethe Yearbook be made available by the editors or publisher to the Treasurer. There also appeared to be consensus on sending a copy of the Goethe Yearbook to each article author.Birgit Tautz and Patricia Simpson reported on the Goethe Yearbook. They highlighted that things are going well. The current volume (Vol. 26) is quite full. They turned down about a half dozen articles. The articles that they have assembled work well together. There is a special section on “Goethe’s Narrative Events” edited by Fritz Breithaupt. Birgit noted that the editors might try introducing a discussion forum in the Yearbook. John Smith proposed a special forum in the Yearbook that might collect references to Goethe (e.g., a reference to Goethe and Eckermann in Moby Dick that was recently brought to his attention). Birgit suggested that an enhanced GSNA website might be a better platform, one that might also include pre-published book reviews.

Karin Schutjer reported on the book series. She proposed that the Bucknell books be displayed at next year’s GSA together with the Scholar’s Choice books. She noted the relatively reasonable prices of books in the series. She wonders if we should try to publish more books (currently the focus is on younger and less established authors), and if the books could be published at a faster pace. Currently the production schedule from delivery of the final manuscript to the publisher to publication takes about 12 months. It was remarked that this is a fairly expeditious pace, but that some presses (such as Penn State) have a somewhat tighter schedule (approximately 9 months).John Smith reported on the Lexicon project that he and Clark Muenzer are heading. He noted that Clark has received a grant of about $50 k from the University of Pittsburgh to help realize the project. There is still discussion about the best platform for the project (digital and/or print). The members of the Executive Board expressed their encouragement for and excitement about the project.Other business: Birgit Tautz mentioned the possibility of hosting a symposium at Bowdoin College in connection with the Goethe Yearbook. Catriona Macleod mentioned that someone has contacted her with the offer to gift a bronze Goethe bust to the GSNA. She raised the question about where it could be housed.See photos here.

Elliott SchreiberVassar College

From the Yearbook Editors

Volume 26 of the Goethe Yearbook, featuring a special section on Goethe’s narrative events and also showcasing work presented at the 2017 Atkins Goethe Conference, will reach the readership soon. Volume 27 is well underway.

For the first time, the Goethe Yearbook is implementing a new format for scholarship and discussion, beginning with a Forum. The working title is “The Canon versus the ‘Great Unread’ (M. Cohen).” With this topic, we hope to prompt a vibrant discussion about the impact of Digital Humanities (DH) and “computational criticism” on Goethe scholarship and 18th-century German Studies. The editors have secured the cooperation of prominent and emerging scholars in the field to contemplate questions such as: What is the relationship between “mining” thousands of texts through algorithms and scholarship “merely” based on interpretation of select literary works? What are the consequences of digitizing primary materials? How do DH methodologies and analytical practices enhance and/or endanger the study of the canon? How does “close reading” versus “distant reading” affect the legacy of canonical authors and their impact on the construction of national literary historiography in the 19th century? What is at stake for the discipline of literary study—for the act of (close) reading—when we ask the question about the canon versus the “great unread”?

The contributions uncover many approaches to the topic that go beyond established scholarly methods v. data sciences, including but not limited to questions of “digital canons” and “forgotten canons,” the significance of paratexts and metadata, alternative reading histories, and DH as a way of navigating the gendered fault-lines of canon formation. Others tackle um 1800 as a primary archaeological site for the digital or reveal the massive amounts of Goethe corpus that are never cited.

The Forum will appear along with a series of articles on Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Friedrich Hölderlin, Goethe’s self-marketing, Goethe and visual culture, eighteenth-century refugee discourse, and others.

Patricia Anne Simpson, University of Nebraska

Birgit Tautz, Bowdoin College

From the Editor of the Book Series

Wiggins

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Williams

We are proud to announce the recent publication of two excellent new volumes in the series New Studies in the Age of Goethe:Odysseys of Recognition:  Performing Intersubjectivity in Homer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, and KleistBy Ellwood Wiggins (University of Washington, Seattle)www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/odysseys-of-recognition/9781684480371"This is an intelligent, serious, patient, and innovative work. It is also beautifully written: nimble, unaffected, crystal-clear, and often entertaining." (Nicholas Rennie, Rutgers University)

Literary 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.

And:Pretexts for Writing:  German Romantic Prefaces, Literature, and PhilosophyBy Seán M. Williams (University of Sheffield, UK)www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/pretexts-for-writing/9781684480524“Pretexts for Writing discusses the history of the literary and philosophical self-authored preface in the German speaking world around 1800 with an intensity and analytical depth previously unachieved in scholarship.” (Till Dembeck, University of Luxembourg)Around 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 entertain your proposals, whether for a single-authored monograph or a collection of essays. Contact Karin Schutjer kschutjer@ou.edu. I hope to hear from you!

Karin Schutjer, University of Oklahoma

From the Editors of the Goethe-Lexicon

From May 2-5, 2019, the first International Workshop for the Goethe-Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts (GLPC) will be held at the University of Pittsburgh. Organized by the lexicon’s co-editors, Clark Muenzer (University of Pittsburgh) and John H. Smith (UC Irvine), this gathering of 20 collaborators from the US, England, Germany, and Switzerland, will build on the 4 GSA panels on “Goethe as a Heterodox Thinker” (which drew more than 150 conferees to its sessions last October). It also looks forward to the GSA Seminar on the same topic in the Fall, as well as the second International Workshop at Cambridge University in the summer of 2020.

The Pittsburgh Workshop will be an important step towards realizing our goal of publishing 10 entries by the end of 2019. Participants will engage in a variety of activities to address different aspects of our collective undertaking, including an ongoing conversation about the very nature of the project. The intensive, 2-day program will include:

1. a panel discussion placing the GLPC in relation to other exemplary lexica, handbooks, and dictionaries, including the Goethe-Handbuch, the Dictionary of Untranslatables, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Mauthner’s Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Aesthetische Grundbegriffe, and Keywords for Today;

2. a second panel, organized by our digital editor Bryan Klausmeyer (Virginia Tech), with presentations on “technical” matters, including a first look at the platform we will be using. Because the GLPC will be a dynamic reference work, we have included information science experts to introduce us to possible options;

3. presentations and discussions of 12 sample entries that will be made available to all participants in advance;

4. breakout sessions to discuss in small groups ideas about how the entries can be framed in general for the Lexicon. While the GLPC cannot be designed by committee, it will be productive to solicit the input of collaborators on such issues as the ideal length for entries, their style, structure, and content, as well as the kinds of Goethean concepts we want to include;

5. a public lecture by Gabriel Trop (University of North Carolina) on “Kraft: On the Potential of a Concept”; and, of course

6. a festive banquet!

In order to work as closely as possible with each other, we have limited the size of our workshops to 20 participants. Importantly, our selection criteria considered scholars at all phases of their careers, as well as geographical and cultural diversity. Members of the GSNA, which as one of the project’s official sponsors has provided some financial assistance, are welcome to contact the editors with their ideas and, of course, their willingness to become collaborators. A Call for the second International Workshop in Cambridge, England, will go out early next winter. Please let us know if you would like to get involved, especially if you have any experience in the digital humanities. If the last 12 months is an indication, there will be many opportunities in the future to come on board. And keep your eye on the next issue of the Goethe Yearbook, where we plan to publish 2 sample entries for the GLPC.

Participants in the Pittsburgh workshop are: Colin Allen (Pittsburgh, History and Philosophy of Science); Jonathan Arac (Pittsburgh, Humanities Center and English); Matthew Bell (King’s College London, German); Frauke Berndt (Zurich, German); Fritz Breithaupt (Indiana, German); Aaron Brenner (Pittsburgh University Library System); Daniel Carranza (Chicago, German); Eckart Förster (Johns Hopkins, German and Philosophy); Jonathan Fine (Brown, German); Bryan Klausmeyer (Virginia Tech, German); Horst Lange (Central Arkansas, German); Charlotte Lee (Cambridge, German); John Lyon (Pittsburgh, German); Catriona MacLeod (University of Pennsylvania, German); Sebastian Meixner (Zurich, German); Clark Muenzer (Pittsburgh, German); Angus Nicholls (Queen Mary’s University, London); John H. Smith (Irvine, German); Gabriel Trop (North Carolina, German); Christian Weber (Florida, German); Christian Wildberg (Pittsburgh, Classics).

The concepts for discussion are: Aperçu (Förster); dämonisch (Nicholls); Eigen-/Selbstliebe (Bell); Gleichnis (Weber); Gott (Lange); Geduld (Carranza); Gewissen (Breithaupt); Pantheismusstreit (Fine); Rhythmus (Lee); Schattenriß (MacLeod); Symbol (Berndt); and Urphänomen (Meixner).

From the Secretary-Treasurer

My first order of business in my new capacity as Secretary-Treasurer was to invest a significant portion of our funds into Bitcoin. The GSNA now owns a handful of them. Just kidding, but do continue to read!

Please remember to pay your 2019 dues. If you have not yet paid your 2018 dues (and would like to receive Goethe Yearbook 26), time is running out!

Please submit your payment via PayPal under the Membership tab of the GSNA website or by mail to Prof. William Carter, Department of World Languages and Cultures, Iowa State University, 3102 Pearson Hall, Ames, IA 50011. Please make checks payable to: “Goethe Society of North America.”

If you are paying by mail for 2018, please also send me an email so I can reserve a copy of Goethe Yearbook 26 for you. Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me: wcarter@iastate.edu.

William Carter, Iowa State University