CFP: Atkins

Goethe's Welt/ Welten

The Atkins Goethe Conference

November 7-9, 2024

Trinity University, San Antonio, TX

Faust declares in the scene “Vor dem Tor” that he has two souls living in his breast, one of which is holding fast to “the world,” “Die eine hält, in derber Liebeslust, / Sich an der Welt…” (“The one holds fast with joyous earthly lust, /Onto the world…”), while the other soul wants to fly away. Faust also complains earlier of his desire to know “was die Welt Im Innersten zusammenhält” (“what holds the core of the world together”). These versions of “world” reflect a kind of materiality, yet also potentially an idealist or spiritual sensibility; they also suggest a sense of the vast cosmos as a scale for the human writ large, or even a political and cosmopolitan perspective on power. The historical context for Goethe’s Faust, however, was the era when explorers, botanists, colonizers, and slave traders were traveling around the world and depicting these experiences in various versions of global travels, as a Reise um die Welt, (Alexander von Humboldt; the Forsters, Adelbert von Chamisso, among others). We find in their accounts wildly different usages of the scalar, spatial, and categorical term “Welt/world,” as well as usages of the term in literary, geographical, philosophical, scientific, social, anthropological, and other discourses inflected by racist, gendered, and colonial views during this era of expansion, travel, industrialization, and increasingly destructive human activities (in environmental terms). How, then, do we contextualize Hegel’s “Weltgeist,” and Schelling’s “objektive Welt,” Goethe’s “Weltliteratur,” or Schiller’s rejection of “Weltgeschichte” in favor of the still broader term, “Universalgeschichte” in his famous 1789 inaugural lecture at the University of Jena in terms of the various meanings of “Welt”/world in this era? Furthermore, how do the categorical designations of Innenwelt, Frauenwelt, Kinderwelt, or Pflanzenwelt pertain to world as a kind of scale in this era at the beginning of the world-changing cultural and environmental practices of the Anthropocene that radically shift global powers and the sense of planetary scale?

The 2024 Atkins conference topic centers arounds concepts of Welt/en-World/s with the questions of how the human (and non-human) relationship to the “world” is portrayed; whether “Welt” is understood to be material or otherwise; and whether it is the world around us as UmWELT, or as cosmopolitan expanse and colonial space for imperialism. On the one hand, such a focus on “Welt” reveals an awareness of the limitations of parochial perspectives and an interest in forging broader networks and understandings; and, on the other hand, “Welt” points to an array of categories plagued by dualisms or racist, sexist, and classist connotations as the Europeans experience or imagine other peoples, other places, other species, and other forms of knowledge. Conceptions of “world/s” might resonate in terms of, or in contrast to, the planet, globalism, nation, continent, “nature,” or realms that designate gender, class, race, psychological states, etc. The GSNA welcomes abstracts that look at the wide array of meanings of (the) world/s, on any scale or for any categories, during Goethe’s lifetime.

Send questions to Heather I. Sullivan, hsulliva@trinity.edu

Send abstracts by March 1, 2024 of no more than 350 words to both Chunjie Zhang and Matthew Birkhold: chjzhang@ucdavis.edu and birkhold.22@osu.edu with the subject line Atkins 2024.

CALL FOR GOETHEZEIT DISSERTATION CHAPTERS FOR WORKSHOP

Taking place Sunday, November 8, 2020

We are delighted to invite interested graduate students working on their dissertations to apply for the 2020 Goethezeit dissertation workshop! Those who are accepted also receive a Gloria Flaherty Scholarship in the amount of $650 (to help with travel costs to the conference) plus a waiver of the conference fee.

In order to encourage and support research in the Age of Goethe, the Goethe Society of North America organizes dissertation workshops at its international Atkins conferences, held every three years. Participating students are selected on the basis of their dissertation prospectus and a letter from their adviser. They will participate in panel discussions, where they are engaged in conversation by senior scholars in their field who direct comments and questions to their projects.

The GSNA will hold its next dissertation workshop at the 2020 Atkins conference in Chicago this fall. All applicants (graduate students working on the dissertation) should:

1. submit the following documents:

   • a. curriculum vitae

   • b. one dissertation chapter

   • c. a prospectus

   • d. a letter from the dissertation advisor briefly evaluating the student’s project and describing its progress.

2. join the GSNA (for just $10!). Membership includes the Society’s newsletter twice each year, as well as a copy of the Yearbook of the Goethe Society of North America.

DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: APRIL 1, 2020

Submit proposals (and send all questions) to Heather I. Sullivan, Vice President of the GSNA, hsulliva@trinity.edu

From the President

Earlier this month, a cross section of German Studies colleagues met in the Victorian Gothic A. D. White House at Cornell, home of the Cornell Society for the Humanities, for the timely and important conference Re-Imagining the Discipline: German Studies, the Humanities, and the University. Happy to have discovered the names Goethe and Schiller prominently inscribed on an ornate Victorian book tree in a classroom next to our venue, I shared with the audience the vital work that scholarly societies such as our own do, both in fostering strong interdisciplinary collaborations, and in affording perspectives on our field that counter today’s more presentist tendencies.

In that vein, I am looking forward to meeting many of you soon at the GSA conference in Portland, where in addition to a raft of exciting Goethe-related seminars, panels, and even business meetings, you can find members of the board at a GSNA table (in the book exhibit area) and happy to chat about our activities, from the Bucknell book series New Studies in the Age of Goethe to the Goethe Yearbook. It’s the first time we’re doing this - please do stop by, say hello, and pick up some information. We are especially eager to get to know younger scholars in the field, so if you have graduate students attending GSA, or are a graduate student or recent Ph.D. yourself, do keep this in mind.

One of our largest undertakings as a society is of course the triennial Atkins Conference. As some of you already know, I recently moved to the University of Chicago, where I am joining an amazing group of Goethe scholars. This has implications for your travel plans in 2020. In case you were expecting a third Pennsylvanian conference in a row, the big news is that we will in fact be returning to Chicago in 2020. Please mark your calendars for November 5-7, 2020. The title of the conference will be Goethe’s Things. I will have more to share about the conference theme at GSA, and you can expect to receive a call for papers very soon.

As always, please let us know about your activities and accomplishments. I am delighted to congratulate Goethe Yearbook editor Birgit Tautz on receiving the 2019 SAMLA book prize for her Translating the World: Toward a New History of German Literature Around 1800 (Penn State UP, 2018).

Catriona MacLeod, University of Chicago

From the President

As President of the North American Goethe Society, I had the privilege of participating in the 85^th Hauptversammlung of the Goethe-Gesellschaft in Weimar from June 7-10.  The Goethe-Gesellschaft serves a broad lay audience by drawing them to Weimar in order to engage in conversations with artists, teachers, other readers, and researchers. Unlike American scholarly societies, the Goethe-Gesellschaft speaks to a still robust Bildungsbürgertum that continues to celebrate Weimar culture.  In addition to bringing scholars and connoisseurs together, the Hauptversammlung also draws international representatives of other Goethe societies. This year many panels focused on Weltliteratur and the global reception of his work, so that discussions took on a very comparative approach.  One important similarity between the North American Society and the Gesellschaft in Weimar is the shared concern to attract young readers of eighteenth-century German literature.Our own 2017 Atkins Goethe Conference is now fast approaching. From November 2-5, we will be gathering at Penn State University in the Nittany Lion Inn for meetings, lectures, dinners, and a dissertation workshop.  We look forward to your arrival in Central Pennsylvania at the height of the Fall season. Our conference will consider the topic “Re-Orientations around Goethe” in order to examine the eighteenth-century’s many kinds of revolutions in conjunction with our own era’s new critical approaches to German literature, politics, science, and art.  Directors at Large John Smith and Heidi Schlipphacke took charge of reviewing the paper proposals and organizing the panels.  This year the Society was able to provide travel funds for foreign scholars, graduate students and non-tenure track professors to attend the Atkins conference. These funds were drawn largely from royalties generated by the online publication of the Goethe Yearbook. Vice President  Catriona MacLeod will also award prizes during the conference for the best essays in eighteenth-century studies. Our connection to German scholarship will be well maintained through two keynote speakers, Helmut Schneider from the University of Bonn and Eva Geulen from the Humboldt University in Berlin.At the Atkins conference, we will also begin an important transition among the positions of our Society’s officers. Patricia Simpson and Birgit Tautz, the new editors of the Yearbook, will also be attending the conference as they take on their new responsibilities.  Please feel free to speak with them about their plans and your interest in publishing in the Yearbook. For the last five years, Elisabeth Krimmer and Adrian Daub have done an excellent job editing the Goethe Yearbook. They have published lively and rigorous volumes. Because of their hard work the Yearbook continues to hold a prominent position in eighteenth-century studies not only in the United States and Canada but also in Germany.  We are most grateful for their attentive work and we wish them success as they continue in their own scholarship and teaching.A few last technical details: The lecture rooms will all be equipped with video projectors, but we ask that you bring along your own laptop computers if you want to show images. Please make sure to register in advance so that we can pass your meal preferences along to the caterers. As our Society continues to attract new scholars, we urge you to renew your membership. Finally, Daylight saving time will come to an end on November 5, so please make sure to adjust your clocks and enjoy the extra hour.

Daniel PurdyPennsylvania State University

From the President

This coming Fall, November 3-5, 2017, we will be gathering together for the next Atkins Goethe Conference on the campus of Penn State University. Established with an endowment from Mr. Stuart Atkins to honor his parents Lillian and Stuart P. Atkins, this year’s international Atkins conference again hopes to attract a wide range of Goethe scholars from all over the world to present their newest research on German culture across the period of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s life, 1749-1832.

Re-Orientations around Goethe, the topic for this Atkins Conference, encourages us to revive the vital questions that so dramatically transformed life around 1800 by demonstrating how they still matter in our own era. We have the opportunity to confirm that the principles of the Enlightenment have not been superseded in the global world, that the realization of true freedom requires us to cultivate the entire person not just a single skill, that the experience of nature can still transform our lives. Goethe’s writing and the work of his contemporaries remind us that the beauty of poetry and philosophy outlasts the political maneuvers of courtiers and adventurers. At the same time, Re-Orientations around Goethe provides us with the occasion to explore the long history of our own era by discovering that many contemporary debates about the environment, media, scientific knowledge, global politics, gender, and sexuality also had their place in the eighteenth century.

Submissions for papers and panels have already started arriving, so I urge you to send your 200-word proposals by April 15 to goethesociety-l@lists.psu.edu. See the Call for Papers here.

Heidi Schlipphacke, John Smith, and I will organize the papers into panels by the end of May so that everyone has ample time over the summer.

The Goethe Society has just recently allocated funds to reimburse travel costs for select graduate students, non-tenure track scholars, and foreign academics who present a paper at the conference. This is a new program, so please let your students and colleagues know that they can request such support when they send in their proposals by including a travel budget.In addition to panels of academic papers on Friday and Saturday, we will also hold a dissertation workshop, organized by the Goethe Society’s Vice President, Catriona MacLeod. This workshop has been very successful over the past conferences as it has provided students with supportive peer responses, while introducing new colleagues to the Society. Please let your students know that their chapter proposals are welcome.

Along with the panels of Society members, two familiar and renowned Goethezeit scholars from Germany will provide keynote addresses. We are very pleased that Helmut Schneider, Professor emeritus from the Universität Bonn, and Eva Geulen, director of the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung and Professor at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin, will speak to us.

Fall is a beautiful time in Central Pennsylvania. The Penn State campus is easily accessible by automobile, bus, and air travel. The local University Park airport (SCE) is ten minutes from the university and it provides connections to major hubs in the Northeast. Rooms have been set aside at the Nittany Lion Inn on campus, and other arrangements are being made as you read this. We can’t wait to see you in November.

Daniel Purdy, Pennsylvania State University