Goethe's Forms
MLA Annual Convention
January 6–9, 2022
Washington, DC
Panel Sponsored by the Goethe Society of North America and the Forum on 18th- and Early-19th-Century German Language, Literature and Culture
Published in 2015, Caroline Levine’s book Forms challenged traditional binaries of form and context and offered a new set of categories for thinking through the relationship of art to political and social life: whole, rhythm, hierarchy, and network. Meanwhile, recent interdisciplinary scholarship in our field has called attention to a multitude of phenomena around 1800 that resonate with these categories and also challenge the form/context binary, e.g., salons and sociability networks, knowledge circulation, genre and gender, temporality and ephemerality, political hierarchies in Weimar and beyond, relationships between human and non-human bodies, and the doubling of literary and scientific meanings of “forms” such as the Urpflanze. Drawing on Levine’s understanding of “forms,” we welcome contributions that engage with the social, aesthetic, scientific, and political meanings of “form” in Goethe’s life and works and the period around 1800.
Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words and a short bio to Mary HelenDupree (mhd33@georgetown.edu) by March 1, 2021.