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.