On October 1, 2016, members of GSNA gathered at the GSA conference for our annual business meeting and cash bar. President Daniel Purdy ran the business meeting, beginning with a report on overall standing of the society, programming initiatives such as Global Goethe and the preparation of the next Atkins Goethe Conference. The conference will take place November 3-4, 2017 on the campus of Penn State University. Daniel, and our two directors-at-large, Heidi Schlipphacke and John Smith, have begun the planning process. Heidi and John are looking forward to paper and panel submissions on “Re-Orientations around Goethe.”Heidi, John, and Vice President Catriona MacLeod formed the Prize and Awards committee this summer, reading many excellent essays on Goethe, his century, and interdisciplinary inquiries of Goethezeit. Catriona read the wonderful citations detailed in her report. She presented the prizes to two winners in attendance, Heather Sullivan and Howard M. Pollak-Milgate. We all were gratified to honor such robust and exciting scholarship, not only in the award-winning essays but also in the Goethe Yearbook and in the book series.Elisabeth Krimmer reported on the upcoming volume of the Goethe YB, and I read Karin Schutjer’s report on the book series. Please see Catriona’s, Elisabeth’s, and Karin’s reports in this newsletter to read about all the recent and forthcoming innovative projects.Finally, Christian Weber assured us of the society’s financial strengths in his report, including discussions about introducing multi-year membership options. Attendees floated various ideas of interest and concern to the GSNA, and we wrapped up by my calling attention to recent books by members and upcoming, society-sponsored conference panels at MLA and ASECS, all of which are an excellent complement to the stellar panel series at GSA (on Goethe and play, organized by Elliott Schreiber and Edgar Landgraf).
Birgit TautzBowdoin College
Heather I. Sullivan and Catriona MacLeodWe also decided to award an honorable mention to an exceptional paper by Jacob Denz, “Rigorous Mediacy: Addressing Mother in Hölderlin’s ‘Am Quell der Donau,’ ‘Die Wanderung,’ and ‘An die Madonna,’” which appeared in MLN.Denz convincingly interprets the womb, via analyses of this figure in Kant and Hegel, as a synecdoche for the maternal, ultimately a synecdoche itself for a notion of organic totality that presents a crisis for Hölderlin. Denz’s sophisticated and highly original close readings of the Hölderlin poems are each a tour-de-force, offering a model for the kind of sustained close work with literature that yields profound insights into the creative and reading processes alike. Denz situates nuanced close analysis within a discussion of some of the pressing philosophical questions of the time in a manner that provides a riveting and utterly enlightening reading experience.We are extremely fortunate to have a new prize this year, the Richard Sussman Prize for scholarship on Goethe or the Goethezeit more generally and science.Howard M. Pollack-Milgate’s highly innovative essay “Gott ist bald 1 ∙ ∞ – bald 1/∞ – bald 0”: The Mathematical Infinite and the Absolute in Novalis” appeared in the journal Seminar in February 2015. In lucid prose, Pollack-Milgate offers an elegant exegesis of Novalis’ understanding of the infinite. Novalis’s concept of Potenzierung is daunting. This essay is a tour de force of sorts, for it makes a clear and compelling case to scholars of Romanticism and lay readers alike for a reconceptualization of Romantic notions of the infinite in terms of an emerging science of calculus. Pollack-Milgate shows us that Novalis studied early texts on calculus and that he then borrowed the language and thought presented by mathematicians to conceive of the infinite in a dual manner, as the meeting, so to speak, of the curve and the line, of the differential and the integral. Pollack-Milgate deftly connects mathematical and philosophical conceptions of the infinite to poetic ones, showing us that “the infinite allows for contradictions to be resolved (as in the meeting point of parallel lines or asymptotes)” (68). As complex as this topic sounds, Pollack-Milgate’s masterful presentation of it manages easily to convince that calculus serves as an illuminating allegory for Romantic notions of the infinite.
Howard Pollack-Milgate and Catriona MacLeodThanks to the special section of the Goethe Yearbook 22 on “Goethe and Environmentalism” there were numerous excellent essays on Goethe and science and so we are happy to offer, in addition to the inaugural Sussmann Prize, an honorable mention to Fred Amrine for his essay, “The Music of the Organism: Uexküll, Merleau-Ponty, Zuckerkandl, and Deleuze as Goethean Ecologists in Search of a New Paradigm.” Amrine brings together a wonderful range of 20th-century thinkers—the subtitle of his talk is quite a mouthful!—in order to demonstrate the way they have been exploring and “normalizing” a “paradigm shift” (à la Thomas Kuhn) that Goethe helped to initiate. All of them offer a different, non-mechanistic, non-binaristic approach to nature. In this essay, as in so much of his other work that likewise deserves honorable mention, Fred has made a powerful case for the Aktualität of Goethe. We could say that Goethe planted the seeds that have blossomed in so many later thinkers, or that Goethe played the theme that has undergone many wonderful variations. Indeed, that latter metaphor is particularly apt in this case because the specific way Fred ties these thinkers together is through their use of music as a way of talking about natural phenomena.