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.

From the Executive Secretary

Goethe Society members and friends have a great deal to look forward to at the 2019-20 GSA and MLA conferences. GSNA-sponsored sessions span a wide range of topics and approaches from Goethe’s heterodox thought and Karl Philipp Moritz’s interdisciplinarity to broader themes of realism, colonialism and decolonization. They also encompass an equally wide range of formats, including a panel, a panel series, a seminar, and a roundtable. This diverse range not only of what we are talking about, but how we are talking with one another, speaks to the Experimentierfreude that is alive and well among the community of scholars affiliated with the GSNA.

For the German Studies Association convention in Portland, Jan Jost-Fritz (East Tennessee State University) and Christian Weber (Florida State University) have co-organized a four-part panel series on “Realism in the Age of Goethe and Its Legacy,” bringing together over 20 scholars. Clark Muenzer (University of Pittsburgh), Karin Schutjer (University of Oklahoma), and John H. Smith (University of California, Irvine) are convening a seminar at the GSA on “Goethe as a Heterodox Thinker” that likewise gathers about 20 participants around a topic that attracted intense interest at last year’s GSA in Pittsburgh. Mattias Pirholt (Södertörn University) has also put together a fascinating panel for the GSA on “Karl Philipp Moritz’s Interdisciplinary Stance.” Together, these GSA sessions include participants from institutions in the US, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and Australia. For the 2020 Modern Language Association convention in Seattle, Jason Groves (University of Washington) and Ervin Malakaj (University of British Columbia) have collaborated to assemble a truly impressive roundtable comprised of 8 panelists addressing “Decolonization and the Age of Goethe.”I want to thank each of these organizers for all their excellent and innovative work. 

As a result of their hard effort, 2019-20 promises to be a banner year for the Goethe Society at both the GSA and the MLA. I hope that many of you will be able to join us in Portland and Seattle!As always, if you are interested in organizing a panel sponsored by the Goethe Society at one of the annual (incl. regional) meetings of ASECS, GSA, or MLA, please contact me.Elliott SchreiberGerman Studies DepartmentBox 72Vassar CollegePoughkeepsie, NY 12604Telephone: (845) 437-5687elschreiber@vassar.eduNote the deadlines for submission of panel proposals.

• GSA, 15 November 2019 for the 2020 convention

• MLA, 1 December 2019 for the 2021 convention

• ASECS, 15 March 2020 for the 2021 convention

We encourage all presenters to become members of the GSNA.

Elliot Schreiber, Vassar College

Minutes of the 2018 Business Meeting

September 29, 2018

German Studies Association Conference

Wyndham Grand Hotel, Pittsburgh

Present:

1. Catriona Macleod, Vice President

2. Daniel Purdy, President

3. Elliott Schreiber, Executive Secretary

4. Karin Schutjer, Editor, New Studies in the Age of Goethe

5. Patricia Simpson, Co-Editor, Goethe Yearbook

6. John Smith, Director-at-Large

7. Birgit Tautz, Co-Editor, Goethe Yearbook

8. Christian Weber, Secretary-Treasurer

Daniel Purdy announced the election results: Heather Sullivan (Vice President, 2019-22), Vance Byrd and Eleonor ter Horst (Directors-at-Large, 2019-22), William Carter (Secretary-Treasurer, 2019-22). 52 members voted.Catriona Macleod announced GSNA Prizes. GSNA Essay Prize: Gabriel Trop for best essay; Leif Weatherby honorary mention. Tove Holmes: Richard Sussman Essay Prize.  Discussion ensued on how best to get the word out about the Richard Sussman Essay Prize. John Smith will announce the prize at a literature and science conference in Toronto. It will continue to be announced on relevant listservs.Christian Weber distributed a summary of the GSNA budget and expenses. He noted that $48 are unaccounted for, and offered to contribute it from his own pocket, which the other members of the Executive Board rejected. He suggested that the GSNA find productive ways to spend its budget, e.g. helping to subsidize Clark Muenzer’s lexicon project. Daniel Purdy asked whether it would be worth spending approximately $70 per month for website security, and there appeared to be a consensus that this would be a good investment. Birgit Tautz suggested that funds could be appropriated for a website linked with the Goethe Yearbook for the purpose of displaying high-resolution images and figures included or referenced in Yearbook articles. She noted that it would be important to find a reliable partner (such as a publisher or educational institution) that could ensure the longevity of such a project. Karin Schutjer proposed giving a stipend to the GSNA Webmaster and Newsletter editor.

Christian noted strong membership numbers. About 50% have elected a 3-year membership. As an aid to recruiting more members, Christian suggested that a list of contributors to the Goethe Yearbook be made available by the editors or publisher to the Treasurer. There also appeared to be consensus on sending a copy of the Goethe Yearbook to each article author.Birgit Tautz and Patricia Simpson reported on the Goethe Yearbook. They highlighted that things are going well. The current volume (Vol. 26) is quite full. They turned down about a half dozen articles. The articles that they have assembled work well together. There is a special section on “Goethe’s Narrative Events” edited by Fritz Breithaupt. Birgit noted that the editors might try introducing a discussion forum in the Yearbook. John Smith proposed a special forum in the Yearbook that might collect references to Goethe (e.g., a reference to Goethe and Eckermann in Moby Dick that was recently brought to his attention). Birgit suggested that an enhanced GSNA website might be a better platform, one that might also include pre-published book reviews.

Karin Schutjer reported on the book series. She proposed that the Bucknell books be displayed at next year’s GSA together with the Scholar’s Choice books. She noted the relatively reasonable prices of books in the series. She wonders if we should try to publish more books (currently the focus is on younger and less established authors), and if the books could be published at a faster pace. Currently the production schedule from delivery of the final manuscript to the publisher to publication takes about 12 months. It was remarked that this is a fairly expeditious pace, but that some presses (such as Penn State) have a somewhat tighter schedule (approximately 9 months).John Smith reported on the Lexicon project that he and Clark Muenzer are heading. He noted that Clark has received a grant of about $50 k from the University of Pittsburgh to help realize the project. There is still discussion about the best platform for the project (digital and/or print). The members of the Executive Board expressed their encouragement for and excitement about the project.Other business: Birgit Tautz mentioned the possibility of hosting a symposium at Bowdoin College in connection with the Goethe Yearbook. Catriona Macleod mentioned that someone has contacted her with the offer to gift a bronze Goethe bust to the GSNA. She raised the question about where it could be housed.See photos here.

Elliott SchreiberVassar College

From the Yearbook Editors

Volume 26 of the Goethe Yearbook, featuring a special section on Goethe’s narrative events and also showcasing work presented at the 2017 Atkins Goethe Conference, will reach the readership soon. Volume 27 is well underway.

For the first time, the Goethe Yearbook is implementing a new format for scholarship and discussion, beginning with a Forum. The working title is “The Canon versus the ‘Great Unread’ (M. Cohen).” With this topic, we hope to prompt a vibrant discussion about the impact of Digital Humanities (DH) and “computational criticism” on Goethe scholarship and 18th-century German Studies. The editors have secured the cooperation of prominent and emerging scholars in the field to contemplate questions such as: What is the relationship between “mining” thousands of texts through algorithms and scholarship “merely” based on interpretation of select literary works? What are the consequences of digitizing primary materials? How do DH methodologies and analytical practices enhance and/or endanger the study of the canon? How does “close reading” versus “distant reading” affect the legacy of canonical authors and their impact on the construction of national literary historiography in the 19th century? What is at stake for the discipline of literary study—for the act of (close) reading—when we ask the question about the canon versus the “great unread”?

The contributions uncover many approaches to the topic that go beyond established scholarly methods v. data sciences, including but not limited to questions of “digital canons” and “forgotten canons,” the significance of paratexts and metadata, alternative reading histories, and DH as a way of navigating the gendered fault-lines of canon formation. Others tackle um 1800 as a primary archaeological site for the digital or reveal the massive amounts of Goethe corpus that are never cited.

The Forum will appear along with a series of articles on Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Friedrich Hölderlin, Goethe’s self-marketing, Goethe and visual culture, eighteenth-century refugee discourse, and others.

Patricia Anne Simpson, University of Nebraska

Birgit Tautz, Bowdoin College

From the Editor of the Book Series

Wiggins

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Williams

We are proud to announce the recent publication of two excellent new volumes in the series New Studies in the Age of Goethe:Odysseys of Recognition:  Performing Intersubjectivity in Homer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, and KleistBy Ellwood Wiggins (University of Washington, Seattle)www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/odysseys-of-recognition/9781684480371"This is an intelligent, serious, patient, and innovative work. It is also beautifully written: nimble, unaffected, crystal-clear, and often entertaining." (Nicholas Rennie, Rutgers University)

Literary recognition is a technical term for a climactic plot device. Odysseys of Recognition claims that interpersonal recognition is constituted by performance, and brings performance theory into dialogue with poetics, politics, and philosophy. By observing Odysseus figures from Homer to Kleist, Ellwood Wiggins offers an alternative to conventional intellectual histories that situate the invention of the interior self in modernity. Through strategic readings of Aristotle, this elegantly written, innovative study recovers an understanding of interpersonal recognition that has become strange and counterintuitive. Penelope in Homer's Odyssey offers a model for agency in ethical knowledge that has a lot to teach us today. Early modern and eighteenth-century characters, meanwhile, discover themselves not deep within an impenetrable self, but in the interpersonal space between people in the world. Recognition, Wiggins contends, is the moment in which epistemology and ethics coincide: in which what we know becomes manifest in what we do.

And:Pretexts for Writing:  German Romantic Prefaces, Literature, and PhilosophyBy Seán M. Williams (University of Sheffield, UK)www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/pretexts-for-writing/9781684480524“Pretexts for Writing discusses the history of the literary and philosophical self-authored preface in the German speaking world around 1800 with an intensity and analytical depth previously unachieved in scholarship.” (Till Dembeck, University of Luxembourg)Around 1800, print culture became a particularly rich source for metaphors about thinking as well as writing, nowhere more so than in the German tradition of Dichter und Denker. Goethe, Jean Paul, and Hegel (among many others) used the preface in order to reflect on the problems of writing itself, and its interpretation. If Sterne teaches us that a material book enables mind games as much as it gives expression to them, the Germans made these games more theoretical still. Weaving in authors from Antiquity to Agamben, Williams shows how European - and, above all, German - Romanticism was a watershed in the history of the preface. The playful, paradoxical strategies that Romantic writers invented are later played out in continental philosophy, and in post-Structuralist literature. The preface is a prompt for playful thinking with texts, as much as it is conventionally the prosaic product of such an exercise.

As always, we’re eager to entertain your proposals, whether for a single-authored monograph or a collection of essays. Contact Karin Schutjer kschutjer@ou.edu. I hope to hear from you!

Karin Schutjer, University of Oklahoma