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.