Submit a Proposal

—– Application Window Closed —–

We are soliciting papers of 20 minutes, as well as proposals for panels, that address the wide range of cultural, scientific, philosophical, and socio-political practices during the Age of Goethe that imagined and constructed meaningful worlds. The goal of the program is to consider the various ways that Goethe and his contemporaries understood and used aesthetic categories across the range of disciplines, as well as the impact of their work on aesthetic theoreticians and practitioners from the 19th through 21st centuries. We want to organize sessions that consider not only the nature of art, but also the theoretical and institutional roles of art and aesthetics in the construction of nature and science, self and society, culture and politics, etc. Papers/panels might address:

• Topics in the fine arts (music and opera; dance; theater; painting, drawing, and sculpture; architecture; gardens) or decorative arts

• Art as a literary motif

• The aesthetics of genre in Goethe and his contemporaries

• Aesthetic self-fashioning and aesthetic education in Weimar

• The role of oppositional aesthetic categories in constructing social and political spaces (the beautiful vs. the sublime, the ugly, or the grotesque; harmony vs. carnival or chaos; purity vs. corruption or pollution; etc.)

• Critiques of aesthetic categories and institutions from the 18th-21st centuries

• Nature and Art: continuities and discontinuities

• Cultural institutions (collecting; collected works; museums; schools; libraries; the theater; reading; salons; publishing; etc.)

• Aesthetic sociality (Geselligkeit): conversation and epistolary correspondence

• Festivities as socio-aesthetic form

• Representation (image; metaphor; symbol and allegory; representing affect), including representations of Goethe in art from the 18th century to the present

To submit a proposal for a paper (250 words), please upload a file that

• carries a docx, doc, or pdf extension

• is entitled “lastname, abbreviated title” (all lower case), as in “smith, new world in prometheus”

• indicates your name and full contact information at the top of the document, including affiliation, if any, and your email address

To submit a proposal for a panel, the organizer should follow the instructions above for submitting four files–one containing a brief description of the panel’s topic and three separate proposals of 250 words from each of the panelists who will be participating. (The person who is proposing the panel may also submit a paper proposal as one of the three participants.)

To submit a proposal for the dissertation workshop, upload a c.v., one dissertation chapter, a prospectus, and a letter from your dissertation advisor. The file(s) should

• carry a docx, doc, or pdf extension

• be entitled “diss, lastname, abbreviated title” (all lower case), as in “diss, smith, new world in prometheus”

The deadline for submitting all proposals is 1 April 2014.