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.

Congratulations to our Essay Prize Winners!

Presented by H. Sullivan, Vice President of the Goethe Society of North America, with special thanks to our wonderful Directors-at-Large, Vance Byrd and Eleanor Ter Horst.We are delighted to bestow two of the annual GSNA essay prizes this year for work published in 2018, one honorable mention, and one prize for the Richard Sussman Award for an essay on Goethe’s science.

2018 GSNA Essay Prizes

Bettina Brandt, “Taming Foreign Speech: Language Politics in Shadow Plays around 1800,” German Studies Review 41.2 (2018): 355-372.

Brandt’s essay focuses on the intersection of popular visual and performance culture and German literature in the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic period. She explores questions of cross-cultural transmission, changing circumstances of performance, and politics surrounding the shift from early modern multilingualism to Romantic monolingualism, reinforced by a growing emphasis on nationalism. Brandt examines the international circulation of shadow plays while questioning the standard ethnonational paradigms of writing media history with her transnational perspective on trends in the performance of Turkish and European plays. The German writers and philologists featured in this article—she analyzes primarily three shadow plays by Achim von Arnim, Christian Brentano, and Ludwig Tieck—were engaging with a rapidly evolving global media culture in which the movement of multilingual people and mixed-media performances could be harnessed for political ends. Her valuable contribution to media history and theory before the advent of photography and cinema inspire us to conduct research that takes seriously how literature around 1800 operated in broader global media ecologies.

Heidi Schlipphacke, “Kinship and Aesthetic Depth: The Tableau Vivant in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften,” Publications of the English Goethe Society 87.3 (2018): 147-165.

Schlipphacke beautifully elucidates the feature of Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften that has inspired so many debates among Goethe’s readers and critics: the extensive descriptions of performances of tableaux vivants. Schlipphacke convincingly links the hybrid aesthetics of the tableau vivant with the simultaneous presence of premodern and modern genres in Goethe’s novel, and with the coexistence of two models of kinship: the premodern extended family and the modern bourgeois nuclear family. Building on the work of Hegel, she describes these performances as a “coming together or collision of heterogeneous elements” which bring our attention to provocative questions of “natural” and material. Her essay is a truly excellent intervention in literary and philosophical reflections as well as visual and performance culture debates on the novel, particularly with its clarity regarding the importance of evolving and competing notions of kinship and subjectivity in this period.

Honorable Mention: Jessica C. Resvick, “Repetition and Textual Transmission: The Gothic Motif in Goethe’s Faust and “Von deutscher Baukunst,” Goethe Yearbook XXV (2018): 133-160.

Resvick’s essay provides yet another example of how scholarship on the Goethezeit benefits from interdisciplinary approaches and sustained attention to literary form. Her essay examines the role of the Gothic, both as an architectural feature and as a more general aesthetic motif, in Goethe’s writings. Linking two of Goethe’s essays on Gothic architcture with the repetition or reappearance of Gothic motifs in Faust, Resvick skillfully draws out the implications of the Gothic for Goethe’s ideas about cultural transmission. She successfully brings together the intersections of architectural theory, print and visual culture, as well as close readings of Goethe to provide exciting new ways to think about aesthetic production and cultural transmission

2018 Richard Sussman Award for an Essay on Goethe’s science

Claudia Kreklau, “Travel, Technology, and Theory: The Aesthetics of Ichthyology during the Second Scientific Revolution,” German Studies Review 41.3 (2018): 589-610.

Kreklau’s fascinating article asks us to consider how natural scientists collected, drew, and disseminated knowledge about foreign fish species transformed in the long nineteenth century. Highly innovative and beautifully illustrated, her interdisciplinary essay paints a picture of global scientific trade in fish specimens that expands our understanding of observation and collection, philosophical thought on beauty, epistemological challenges of studying the seemingly threatening life in the deep sea, as well as the print culture and illustration processes. Ichthyology, in her persuasive account, provides new ways of thinking about nature and truth in the period. Moving from Kant’s declaration of the “horrible” ocean to the slow development of ichthyology, Kreklau’s links the fields of scientific inquiry, aesthetics and the development of aquariums throughout Europe, demonstrating closely artistic representation and the invention of new technologies for reproducing art were tied to the development of scientific ideas. 

Sussman Prize: Call for Nominations

The executive committee seeks nominations or self-nominations for its annual Richard Sussman Essay Prize for the best essay published in 2018 on Goethe’s contributions to the sciences and on Goethe in the history of science.Please submit a copy of the essay (electronic version preferred) by April 30, 2018 to the Society’s Vice-President, Professor Heather Sullivan, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Trinity University, One Trinity Place, San Antonio, TX 78212, hsulliva@trinity.edu.The following articles are eligible:

1. articles written by a North American scholar (defined by institutional affiliation at the time of publication); or

2. articles written by a current member of the GSNA; or

3. articles published in the Goethe Yearbook.

NB: Articles by current GSNA board members are not eligible. GSNA members are encouraged to submit their own articles for consideration.

2017 Prizes Announced

It was an exciting year for Goethezeit studies, with over forty essays for the committee to read, of truly high quality. I would like to thank committee members John Smith and Heidi Schlipphacke for their stalwart work, reading so many articles over summer break.Gabriel Trop published three articles in 2017, each of which was worthy of an award. The committee selected as the essay prize winner “Goethe’s Faust and the Absolute of Naturphilosophie,” The Germanic Review 92.4 (2017): 388-406. The article succeeds remarkably in several ways: it offers a new perspective on one of the most written about and studied plays; it makes Schelling’s version of Naturphilosophie not only clear in its essence but also applicable as a way of understanding a literary text; and it gives us a new insight into the makings of tragedy. Trop sees in Schelling an ontology of tensions and conflicting forces—attraction and repulsion, contraction and expansion. As Trop writes elegantly: “a chaotic reserve of disorder belongs intrinsically to the unfolding of the absolute of Naturphilosophie.” Precisely this structure makes for the principle of signification in Faust, as Trop shows in fresh analyses of disorderly figures including Gretchen, Homunculus, and Euphorion, concluding that in his resistance to the Eternal Feminine Mephistopheles both negates life and presents a new ethics of the absolute. The key is that the tragic unfolding is not based in the subjectivity of the striving Faust but in the very nature of the Absolute itself.The committee also awarded an honorable mention to another scholar who had an exceptionally productive year, Leif Weatherby, for his elegant essay “A Reconsideration of the Romantic Fragment,” which indeed appeared in the same issue of The Germanic Review immediately after Trop’s essay (pp. 407-25). As a form of Witz that is a conjunction of opposites, the fragment, in Weatherby’s reading, also is a mediating place where science and poetry intersect through material irony.We also had to decide on an essay with a focus on natural science, for the Richard Sussman Essay Prize. Here, too, there were some interesting choices for us, with studies of chemistry, light, and, of course, equilibrium, thanks to a special issue of The Germanic Review edited by Jocelyn Holland and Gabriel Trop. However, we selected the nuanced essay by Tove Holmes, “Reizende Aussichten: Aesthetic and Scientific Observation in Albrecht von Haller’s Die Alpen,” published in Modern Language Notes 132.3 (2017): 753-74. Haller’s long poem is not at the top of many of our reading lists, so it was refreshing to see it brought to life in this essay and rescued from Lessing’s potent negative reading of its descriptive mode. Holmes shows the way Haller’s scientific sensibility frames a way of observing the world that then feeds into the poetic descriptions, notably ekphrasis. But the reverse is also true: according to Holmes, because Haller wrote his poem at a time just before the “two cultures” of natural science and the humanities separated over different conceptions of methodology, his poetic sensibility, informed by a traditional notion of energeia or “bringing vividly before the eyes,” shaped his scientific observations and invites us to look forward as well to a more modern practice of scientific observation.

Catriona MacLeodUniversity of Pennsylvania

2016 Richard Sussman Prize

We are pleased to announce the 2016 winner of the Richard Susan Prize for the best essay published on Goethe’s contributions to the sciences and on Goethe in the history of science. (See a list of previous award winners here.)Jocelyn Holland, “Observing Neutrality C. 1800,” Goethe Yearbook 23 (2016): 41-57. This is a disciplined, far-reaching investigation into the concept of neutrality in three disciplines: science, politics, and literature. Scientific discussions of neutral, that is, non-acidic or basic, chemicals connect here with political debates and reshape future readings of Goethe’s insistence on avoiding prejudices. Jocelyn’s work on “neutrality” or “Unparteilichkeit” has also given us tremendous literary insights into Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre, especially the schöne Seele, but still more widely expands into other works.