As always, I encourage you to let me know if there are particular areas of research that you are interested in reviewing for the Goethe Yearbook. Please send books for review and suggestions for books for review to:Professor Sean FranzelDepartment of German and Russian StudiesUniversity of Missouri428 Strickland HallColumbia MO, 65211Telephone: (573) 882-4328Fax: (573) 884-8456franzels@missouri.edu
Call for Papers: MLA 2019
Goethe's International Relations: Imagining the Ausland 1770-1832
This panel welcomes papers on all aspects of the national/international, foreign/domestic, heimisch/fremd/unheimlich border in the age of Goethe, for example: representations of migration, wandering, displacement, and exile; comparative literary relations and world literature; the international or trans-regional reputation of and influences on Goethe or other figures of the age; foreignness, abroad or extimate; Orientalism and cosmopolitanism; border crossings and homecomings; translation and rewriting of or by Goethe and others across national and linguistic boundaries in that period.Please send 250-word abstracts to Joseph O’Neil (joseph.oneil@uky.edu) by March 20, 2018.
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.
2016 Essay Prize
This year, we were again in the fortunate position to be able to award two prizes for the Goethe Society Prize. Here are our two best essays on Goethe or the Goethezeit published in 2016, with congratulations to both authors! (See a list of previous award winners here.).Gabrielle Bersier, “‘Hamiltonian-Hendelian’ Mimoplastics and Tableau of the Underworld: The Visual Aesthetics of Goethe’s 1815 Proserpina Production.” Goethe Yearbook 23 (2016): 171-94.This essay pays fascinating and innovative attention to the visual aspects of the underworld monologue in the rather understudied play Proserpina. Bersier elegantly illuminates the transformation in the play from static pantomime (à la Emma Hamilton and her attitudes) to dance, and its overturning of former collaborator Böttiger’s Christian priorities for the art, thus providing a move into what she calls the proto-cinematic development of pantomime. She thereby also sheds new light on Goethe’s theater productions through his ongoing interest in mimoplastics and tableaux vivants.Bryan Klausmeyer, “Fragmenting Fragments: Jean Paul’s Poetics of the Small in “Meine Miszellen.” Monatshefte 108.4 (Winter 2016): 485-509.Bryan Klausmeyer’s scintillating article on Jean Paul and the genre of the miscellany convinced us that genre here is not a fixed genre but rather inherently a genre of non-genre producing monstrous or hybrid possibilities that exceed even the Romantic tendency to Gesamtkunstwerke as fragments. We also appreciated the careful attention this article paid both to the materiality of writing and to small or minor forms (countering Jean Paul’s reputation as an author of excruciatingly long novels). Minor forms are often underappreciated because they defy canon, yet as Bryan shows, anticipate modern tendencies such as serialization.
Call for Papers: GSA 2018
Heterodox Thinking: Goethe and the Creation of Philosophical Concepts
Panel 1: Philosophical Conceptualization and GoethePanel 2: Philosophical Conceptualization in Faust and the PoetryPanel 3: Philosophical Conceptualization in the Dramatic and Narrative FictionPanel 4: Philosophical Conceptualization in the Scientific and Aesthetic WorksIn Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Richard Rorty gives prominent mention to Goethe as a philosophical contrarian who is situated “on the margins of the history of modern philosophy.” According to Rorty, Goethe, along with other heterodox thinkers (like Kierkegaard, Santayana, James, Dewey, and Heidegger) typically shocked systematic philosophy by waging war on its foundational principles, including the conceptual structures, or universals, that have traditionally supported it. Taking a cue from Rorty’s inclusion of Goethe in his lineage of “edifying” philosophers, this series of panels will consider the writer’s re-invention of philosophical concepts as part of his own philosophical edification (Bildung). If Goethe’s relation to the received opinions (doxa) of the professors of philosophy around 1800 was fraught, as he documents in “Einwirkung der neueren Philosophie,” (1820) it also prompted him to pursue an alternative kind of philosophical method, “durch die ich die Meinungen der Philosophen, eben auch als wären es Gegenstände, zu fassen und mich daran auszubilden suchte.”We invite paper proposals for a series of four panels that will explore Goethe’s heterodox re-thinking of philosophical concepts.Papers for three of the panels will focus on specific conceptual investments in Faust and the poetry, the plays and the narrative fiction, and the scientific and aesthetic works. Proposals for these work-specific papers, which we envision as “entries” in a Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts for Goethe, should explore the semantic range of a single linguistic marker. We are especially interested in examining concepts that Deleuze and Guattari call ”signed” (e.g., Aristotle’s “substance,” Descartes “cogito,” Leibniz’ “monad,” and Kant’s “condition.”) For Goethe these might include (1) signature words that he hijacked from the philosophical tradition, but that function differently for him: e.g., Subjekt, Idee, transzendental, Monade; (2) signature words that he coined: e.g., Urphänomen; or (3) signature words that he adapted for his own conceptual purposes: e.g., Polarität, Steigerung, Tat, Erscheinung, Bedingung. Beyond such “signature” words, papers might also explore (4) ambiguous words that change their “meanings” across several of his works or within a single work: e.g., Leiden, scheinen, Geist, trüb, Wahn, Schaudern; (5) coined words that shock: e.g., irrlichtilieren; (6) coined compound-words: e.g., Wechsel-Dauer or das Ewig-Weibliche; (7) everyday words that may not resonate philosophically for the untrained ear: e.g., Herz, Gefühl, Herrlichkeit, Wonne, Liebe, Form; (8) theological words, for example ewig or transzendent; (9) grammatical lexemes or syntactical units: e.g., the indirect object mir in the first line of “Mailied,” the wenn-clauses in Werther, or the preposition hinan in Faust; or (10) formal features (such as prosody) that create meanings: e.g., Knittelvers and Ottava Rima in Faust or the distich in the elegies.In addition to papers on individual concepts we also welcome proposals for a panel on more general topics. Examples might include (11) historical dimensions of the philosophical concept within the western tradition; (12) the challenge of identifying/choosing the entries for the lexicon project for Goethe; (13) Goethe’s conceptualization of the concept (Begriff); (14) the relation of philosophical conceptualization in Goethe to metaphor and/or Bildlichkeit; or (15) the philosophical conceptualization of the literary symbol as process (Goethean Symbolik); (16) what should all entries in the lexicon project for Goethe include?Papers should be about 2000 words in length, but should not exceed 2500 words. Please submit proposals of 300-500 words by January 22, 2018, to Clark Muenzer (muenzer@pitt.edu) and John H. Smith (jhsmith@uci.edu). Completed papers must be submitted by August 31, 2018.All presenters at the GSA conference must become GSA members by February 15, 2018, see https://www.thegsa.org.