With the invigorating Atkins Conference at Penn State behind us, the Society is looking forward to new elections to its executive board. After Elliot Schreiber succeeded Birgit Tautz as Executive Secretary in the fall, and Birgit and Patty Simpson took over the reigns as co-editors of the Goethe Yearbook from Adrian Daub and Elisabeth Krimmer, we are now looking to fill the positions of Vice President, Director-at-Large (2x), and Secretary-Treasurer.Our nominating committee, comprised of Mary Helen Dupree, John Lyons, and Leif Weatherby, will be glad to accept nominations and self-nominations from members. If you would like to make one, please write to the committee chair, John Lyons, at jblyon@pitt.edu, by May 1.
From the President
Last November we held the Goethe Society’s triennial Atkins Conference at Penn State University on the theme of Re-Orientations around Goethe. As in our previous meeting, 85 North American and European scholars contributed presented talks. All together, we had thirty events, including keynote addresses by Helmut Schneider from the University of Bonn and Eva Geulen from the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung at the Humboldt University of Berlin. The Presidential Forum provided a glimpse of the diversity of orientations around Goethe’s work, which was then expanded by a Pop Up Rare book exhibit on “Goethe Re-oriented,” sponsored by the Eberly Family Special Collections Library.I am most grateful to everyone who helped run the conference. Heidi Schlipphacke and John Smith helped delicately balance the many paper proposals into focused panels. My colleague, Tom Beebee, organized the logistics here on campus. Catriona MacLeod set up the dissertation workshop for graduate students writing on Goethe topics while also leading the committee to award prizes for the best essays on the Goethezeit. Christian Weber was a steady hand on the financial side of the conference.Some of our officers have changed roles. Birgit Tautz and Patty Simpson have taken up the editorship for the Goethe Yearbook and Elliott Schreiber has stepped in to fill the responsibilities of the Executive Secretary in organizing events at national conferences.This spring the Goethe Society will be preparing for the next round of elections in the fall semester. In the summer, Burkhard Henke will send out announcements regarding the candidates and the online voting procedure. Our schedule will be to gather your nominations for Vice President, Secretary-Treasurer, and two Directors-at-Large by May 1; send out email ballots by September 1; gather the votes by September 23; so that we can announce the results at the GSA business meeting on September 28. The new officers will fill their positions starting on January 1, 2019, with the current Vice President, Catriona MacLeod, succeeding to the Presidency.If you have nominations please do not hesitate to send an email to John Lyons, jblyon@pitt.edu, chair of the nominating committee, which also includes Mary Helen Dupree, mhd33@georgetown.edu, and Leif Weatherby, leif.weatherby@nyu.edu.
Daniel PurdyPennsylvania State University
From the Yearbook Editors
Our first volume as editors is well underway and will feature some work showcased first at our memorable Atkins Goethe Conference at Penn State, in addition to new scholarship from North America, Europe, and Australia. As always, we welcome manuscripts on any and all aspects of Goethe, his contemporaries, and the 18th century broadly conceived, including the century’s legacy. We also are interested in broadening the discussion, in organizing special sections, and experimenting with new forms and genres of scholarly writing. Please contact us with any and all suggestions at editors@goethesociety.org!Note that the Goethe Yearbook is a double-blind, peer-reviewed publication, widely indexed, and published with DOIs. All manuscripts should be prepared in MS Word, and in accordance with the Yearbook’s style sheet – published on our web site – and anonymized for review. Manuscript submissions should be no longer than 8,500 words.
Patricia Anne SimpsonUniversity of Nebraska
Birgit TautzBowdoin College
From the Editor of the Book Series
This fall, two titles will be appearing in the GSNA series at Bucknell University Press, New Studies in the Age of Goethe:
- Odysseys of Recognition: Performing Intersubjectivity in Homer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Kleist by Ellwood Wiggins (University of Washington, Seattle)
- Pretexts for Writing: German Romantic Prefaces, Literature, and Philosophy by Seán Williams (University of Sheffield, UK)
Bucknell University Press has now transitioned to a new partnership with Rutgers University Press, which will bring several advantages including lower cover prices and GSNA-member discounts. So this is a wonderful time to send us your proposals for monographs or edited collections! Contact me at kschutjer@ou.edu.
Karin SchutjerUniversity of Oklahoma
New Books by Members
Tautz, Birgit. Translating the World: Toward a New History of German Literature Around 1800. Max Kade German-American Research Institute Series. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018.
From the publisher:In Translating the World, Birgit Tautz provides a new narrative of German literary history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Departing from dominant modes of thought regarding the nexus of literary and national imagination, she examines this intersection through the lens of Germany’s emerging global networks and how they were rendered in two very different German cities: Hamburg and Weimar.German literary history has tended to employ a conceptual framework that emphasizes the nation or idealized citizenry; yet the experiences of readers in eighteenth-century German cities existed within the context of their local environments, in which daily life occurred and writers such as Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe worked. Hamburg, a flourishing literary city in the late eighteenth century, was eventually relegated to the margins of German historiography, while Weimar, then a small town with an insular worldview, would become mythologized for not only its literary history but its centrality in national German culture. By interrogating the histories of and texts associated with these cities, Tautz shows how literary styles and genres are born of local, rather than national, interaction with the world. Her examination of how texts intersect and interact reveals how they shape and transform the urban cultural landscape as they are translated and move throughout the world.A fresh, elegant exploration of literary translation, discursive shifts, and global cultural changes, Translating the World is an exciting new story of eighteenth-century German culture and its relationship to expanding global networks that will especially interest scholars of comparative literature, German studies, and literary history.Find Translating the World here, and take 30% off with code BT17 when you order through psupress.org.