FROM THE YEARBOOK EDITORS

In the midst of another challenging year, we are grateful to our authors, manuscript evaluators, and book reviewers—the latter so ably corralled by Sean Franzel—and, last but not least, our indefatigable copy editor, Monica Birth, who have all enabled us to put together another fascinating volume. Like the predecessors it has been our honor to edit, volume 29 of the Goethe Yearbook represents continuity and innovation; what sets it apart is the fact that several essays seem to continue the conversation begun in last year's issue.

Edward Potter's essay on Anton Reiser speaks to both the unabating pursuit of scholarship on Karl Philipp Moritz (which we have featured frequently over the past two years) as well as the renewed interest in questions of sentimentalism as a literary period and eighteenth-century style. But Potter also turns to questions of sexuality and gender. These questions, focused in concepts of patriarchy and its disruption, are at the core of Birgit Jensen's essay, which branches out into broader concerns about cultural legacies and myth and invites their ongoing consideration. Befittingly, two more essays revolve around such questions, albeit in vastly different ways. History of philosophy and science scholar Oriane Petteni introduces a novel model of reading Goethe's morphology, reminding us that questions of algorithms and pattern recognition are no longer confined to digital humanities and computational studies of literature but have arrived as part and parcel of our methodological toolkit. And Robert Kelz takes us again to Argentina. In a fascinating prequel to last year's essay on Goethe commemorations, he invites us back into the complex politics of Buenos Aires in the twentieth century and the role of a German cultural icon. Equally compelling, Kelz invokes a transnational fascination with archival material and the cultural policies both hidden and exposed in them—particularly welcome at a time when onsite research ceased being an option for so many of us, unable to physically access the treasure troves of our work. The penultimate freestanding essay in this volume, Barry Murnane's reconsideration of Goethe's Weltliteratur in the context of Handelsverkehr (trade) with China continues a conversation about the worldliness of eighteenth-century German literature and culture that has been vigorous for some time now and gestures well beyond the uptake of individual concepts or motifs. Coincidentally, it also invites further dialogue with forthcoming or fresh-off-the-press books (at the time of this writing). We hope these, too, will be well received once this volume arrives in your mailboxes. And any essay on conceptual and material trade reaches beyond this volume and anticipates the next. Beyond words, texts, and eighteenth-century worlds, we are looking forward to animated conversations about "Goethe's Things"—his "Gespräch mit den Dingen," or dialogue with objects. We hope to feature many facets of the latter in volume 30, devoted to work first presented at the Atkins Goethe Conference 2020, planned for November 2021 at the University of Chicago.

In another novelty, we feature not one but two special sections. One, quite naturally, commemorates an anniversary, Hölderlin's 250th birthday. It contains work devoted to "reading and exhibiting," first presented in collaboration with the DLA Marbach and its American Friends and here compiled by Meike Werner. The other special section, on movement, edited by Heidi Schlipphacke, picks up on research first featured at MLA 2021 and revisits many questions of sentimentalism, visuality, and narration that are at the core of canon formation and eighteenth-century thresholds of modernity. We take it as a good sign that the last essay in this section, by Eleanor ter Horst, challenges us to think about and rethink collaboration and dialogue as constitutive of authorship, just like our robust review section invites our collective engagement with terrific scholarship in eighteenth-century studies. We close these prefatory remarks with the reiteration of gratitude to all those who made yet another pandemic Yearbook possible. The work represented in this volume continues to energize the discipline in challenging ways during challenging times. 

Patricia Anne Simpson

Birgit Tautz

Announcing the Winners of the 2021 GSNA Essay Prizes

The Goethe Society of North America is delighted to announce the winners of the 2021 GSNA Essay Prizes. The Awards Committee this year was comprised of Heather Sullivan (Vice President) together with Matthew Birkhold and Mary Helen Dupree.

Congratulations to the winners, as well as heartfelt thanks to the members of the Awards Committee!

The Richard Sussman Science Prize: 

Michael Saman, "Towards Goethean Anthropology: On Morphology, Structuralism, and Social Observation," in the Goethe Yearbook

Michael Saman’s compelling essay connects Goethe’s scientific morphological studies to the practice of systematically observing human culture, thereby expanding our understanding of Goethe’s interdisciplinary methodology. Saman analyses three key Goethe passages describing mass events (the coronation in Dichtung und Wahrhheit, the Roman Carnival, and the St. Roch festival in Bingen); these passages delineate Goethe’s morphological paradigm and prefigure a number of 20th-century anthropologists such as Tzvetan Todorov and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Saman writes: “Though his principles of observation will most prominently be developed in reference to natural phenomena…Goethe holds that, in effect, … such that phenomena outside of nature, including human culture and society, can be interpreted in analogous morphological terms.” In fact, as Saman notes, Goethe claims in “Zur Morphologie”: “Ich verstehe die menschliche Gesellschaft” (MA 12:69; I understand human society).“ While Saman notes that Goethe “never explicitly expound a theory of social observation,” this essay nevertheless provides significant insight into how Goethe extends and morphs the science of observation throughout his studies of the natural world, art, and human society.

The GSNA Essay Prizes:

Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge, "Karl Philipp Moritz as Cognitive Narratologist: Travel Writing, Visualization, and Literary Experience," in the Lessing Yearbook

and

Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge, "Aural Enlightenment: Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock's Contributions to New Enlightenment Aesthetics," in The Germanic Review

Sarah, Heather, and Hannah at the hotel reception in at the Atkins Goethe Conference in Chicago on Saturday.

In her article, Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge makes several exciting contributions to Goethezeit scholarship and Germanistik more broadly, bringing new understanding to travel writing of the 18th-century. First, in lucid prose, Eldridge synthesizes a variety of theories to devise an illuminating cognitive literary-historical lens through which to analyze works of literature. In so doing, she creates new opportunities for examining the ways in which literature exposed readers to new objects, peoples, and ideas and created possibilities for reflecting on one’s own and others’ cultures. Eldridge turns her deft attention to Moritz’s Reisen eines Deutschen in England (1783). In addition to modeling an innovative approach to literary analyses, she thus provides new insights into Mortiz’s text, a travel narrative both dismissed as an artistic mistake and celebrated as a literary success. She writes: “Perspective encompasses questions of perception and spatial location as well as opinion and representation; description combines the novel and the familiar in varying degrees to evoke more or less vivid visualization; experience involves interaction between the interior self and the exterior environment and can apply either to a character (fictional or not) or to readers, who experience the text itself as they read.” Through meticulous close readings and carefully situated arguments, Eldridge highlights the author’s awareness of the mental processes at work as he tours England: the interplay of his preconceived ideas and new experiences, the role of language, the interrelation of his mood and impressions. In so doing, she uncovers how eighteenth-century writers and readers conceived of these processes. Eldridge further enlivens the genre of travel writing and expands the ways we might fruitfully approach these texts by showing the value of the specificity and richness of literature to cognitive science. Ultimately, Eldridge’s case study emphasizes the value of literature in the study of cognition. And Eldridge–thanks to her rigorous scholarship and sharp prose—ensures this is a credible contention.

Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge’s exploration of the “Aural Enlightenment” offers a marvelously erudite close reading of Klopstock in crystalline and engaging prose; as one of our committee members noted, in fact, even the footnotes are lovely and detailed. She reads Klopstock’s privileging of the aural in his poetry and poetics in the context of a more expansive reading of (late) Enlightenment in terms of “an anthropological understanding of the whole range of human access to the world.” According to Eldridge, Klopstock’s writings on declamation, orthography and metrics participate in the re-sensualization of language (“Versinnlichung der Rede”) postulated by Dirk Oschmann. The essay centers on a close reading of Klopstock’s poem “Das Gehör” in which she shows how the poem privileges orality (and its sociable and emotional dimension) both on the content level and on the level of language itself. Importantly, she acknowledges the need for approaches that deal with the racist implications of theories of language in the 18th century (at the beginning and end of the essay) and also that she acknowledges the attention that Klopstock gives to the anatomical processes of hearing in the poem. Indeed, Vandegrift Eldridge does not ignore the violent legacies of the Enlightenment, but rather confronts them head-on, and in this sense, provides a good model for others working on the period more broadly.



Honorable Mention:

Karin Wurst, "Weimar: An Experiment in Creativity" in Goethe Yearbook

Karin Wurst’s exciting essay focuses on things, on collections of objects, and the spaces that they occupy, all of which not just represent but rather cultivate creativity. Wurst describes such collections, in fact, as “dynamic state of becoming,” or modes of convergence and nodes of productive encounters. She thereby produces an inspired and very thoroughly-researched essay that builds on some of the findings of ‚EreignisWeimar‘ to sketch out a portrait of Weimar circa 1800 as a „convergence“ of knowledge, objects, and people in which creativity flourished, in part due to the establishment of institutions and spaces (e.g., the Zeichenschule, the Freitagsgesellschaft) where interdisciplinary conversations could take place outside of traditional disciplinary frameworks. She elaborates Goethe’s ideas of artistic freedom and the “inner conceptual workings of creativity and the ways they produce novelty” as material empirical innovation. Wurst’s fascinating focus on the popular Lifestyle magazine of the era, Journal des Luxus und der Moden, expand our sense of Weimar’s new organization of systems and perception in terms of economic, material, and intellectual innovation.

CFP: MLA Annual Convention 2022

Goethe's Forms

MLA Annual Convention
January 6–9, 2022

Washington, DC

Panel Sponsored by the Goethe Society of North America and the Forum on 18th- and Early-19th-Century German Language, Literature and Culture

Published in 2015, Caroline Levine’s book Forms challenged traditional binaries of form and context and offered a new set of categories for thinking through the relationship of art to political and social life: whole, rhythm, hierarchy, and network. Meanwhile, recent interdisciplinary scholarship in our field has called attention to a multitude of phenomena around 1800 that resonate with these categories and also challenge the form/context binary, e.g., salons and sociability networks, knowledge circulation, genre and gender, temporality and ephemerality, political hierarchies in Weimar and beyond, relationships between human and non-human bodies, and the doubling of literary and scientific meanings of “forms” such as the Urpflanze. Drawing on Levine’s understanding of “forms,” we welcome contributions that engage with the social, aesthetic, scientific, and political meanings of “form” in Goethe’s life and works and the period around 1800.

Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words and a short bio to Mary HelenDupree (mhd33@georgetown.edu) by March 1, 2021.

CFP for 2021 Atkins Goethe Conference

Goethe’s Things

November 5-7, 2021
The University of Chicago

Please note, this is a second call for papers for the Atkins conference that was originally scheduled for November 2020. If your paper was submitted and accepted in 2020, you may choose to retain it, or you may submit a new proposal.

“ich bin den ganzen Tag in einem Gespräch mit den Dingen”

At a moment when material culture itself was in a state of flux and transformation, Novalis rather back-handedly compared Goethe’s achievements on the literary marketplace with Josiah Wedgwood’s pre-eminence in marketing classicizing luxury goods. Goethe’s place in a changing new world of commodities has been central to a number of significant scholarly studies on topics such as fashion, entertainment, collecting, and luxury over the past two decades. The recent material turn in the humanities more broadly has given rise to multiple new approaches to, and theorizations of, objects, things, and stuff, from thing theory to the new materialisms, often emphasizing the lively or agentic quality of things. These may shed additional light on Goethe’s self-described “conversation with things.” We invite submissions that reflect upon Goethe and his age from a material perspective. Challenging the notion that a turn to the material world represents a shift away from more theoretical concerns, Goethe’s sensual orientation to the “thingly” world suggests that we consider as well how the material may also be in dialog with the philosophical during this period. And, on the other hand, we may wish to consider how “weakly” theoretical artifacts in fact call attention to knowledge production in specialized fields.
 
Submissions may take the form of complete sessions or individual papers. Topics that might be considered include: objects, subjectivity, affect, the sensorium; collections, exhibitions, galleries, studios, studies, libraries, archives, theatres; architecture; texts and images as material artefacts; paper; textiles; domestic culture and lifestyle; fashion; consumer goods and culture; copies and reproductions; the reception of antique artefacts; gardens; science (mineralogy, chemistry, etc.); instruments and apparatus (musical, scientific, etc.).

We are also opening a new subtopic for papers on disease and epidemics in the Goethezeit, a subject which has numerous material as well as discursive implications.

Please send 200-250 word proposals to: atkins2020@lists.uchicago.edu, by March 1, 2021.

2019 Essay Prizes Announced

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.