From the Vice President

Call for Goethezeit dissertation

In order to encourage and support research in the Age of Goethe, the Goethe Society of North America organizes dissertation workshops at its international Atkins conferences, held every three years. As you know, this year’s conference will be held in State College, PA.Participating students, who are selected on the basis of their dissertation prospectus and a letter from their adviser, are all awarded a Gloria Flaherty Scholarship in the amount of $500 plus a waiver of the conference fee. More importantly, they participate in panel discussions, where they are engaged in conversation by senior scholars in their field who direct comments and questions to their projects.All applicants are expected to join the GSNA (for just $10!). Membership includes the Society’s newsletter twice each year, as well as a copy of the Yearbook of the Goethe Society of North America. See our web site for more information.The dissertation workshop will be held on Sunday, November 5, 2017. Graduate students interested in participating are asked to submit a c.v., one dissertation chapter, and a prospectus by April 1, 2014, along with a letter from the dissertation advisor briefly evaluating the student’s project and describing its progress.Submit your materials, and direct any questions, to Catriona MacLeod at cmacleod@sas.upenn.edu.With this continuing commitment, the GSNA hopes to contribute to the academic and intellectual success of graduate students engaged in Goethe studies and quite possibly to identify new talent for the Goethe Yearbook and our book series.

Catriona MacLeodUniversity of Pennsylvania

From the Editor of the Book Series

We want to announce a change to our editorial policy: in response to multiple author inquiries, and with the strong support of the GSNA board, we have begun accepting proposals for edited essay collections. As always though, we remain very committed to publishing your single-authored monographs.Vance Byrd’s fascinating study, A Pedagogy of Observation: Nineteenth-Century Panoramas, German Literature, and Reading Culture, will be going into production soon. Look for it in the coming months!Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me with any inquiries.

Karin SchutjerUniversity of Oklahoma

From the Yearbook Editors

Volume 24 of the Goethe Yearbook is currently in the final stages of typesetting and should be in your mailboxes by late spring. It will contain a special section on the “Poetics of Space and Place in the Goethezeit,” co-edited by Elliott Schreiber and John B. Lyon, as well as standalone articles on Caroline de la Motte Fouqué, on widow-burning in Karoline von Günderrode, on ontology and signification in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Sandmann, on “Educational Environments in Goethe and Kleist,” on F.H. Jacobi’s Allwill, and on Goethe’s Divan as reflected in Thomas Lehr’s novel September. Fata Morgana (2010). Once again we are very pleased that this volume brings together very diverse scholarship, and that our contributors once again run the gamut from graduate students to emeriti. And our new book review editor Sean Franzel has brought together more than 20 thoughtful reviews of recent publications relevant to the Goethezeit.We are well on our way towards putting together the twenty-fifth volume of the Yearbook. It will contain a special section on “What Goethe heard,” edited by Mary Helen Dupree. However, it will also contain a large number of standalone articles. As always, we would be thrilled if you submitted a manuscript, or encouraged your students and colleagues to do so. Manuscript submissions should reach us by late May, preferably earlier. Submissions should follow the Chicago Manual of Style and confine themselves to less than 35 pages. For specific questions about scholarly citations, please consult the Yearbook’s style sheet. Note that the entire run of back issues is available on Project MUSE.Finally, Volume 25 will be the last Goethe Yearbook under our auspices. So please give some thought to putting your name forward when the GSNA begins its search for our successors. We have really loved our time shepherding this wonderful journal, and we are quite sure you would too!

Adrian DaubStanford University

Elisabeth KrimmerUniversity of California at Davis

Call for Papers: Joint Panel at MLA 2018

The Goethe Society of North America and the MLA forum on Comparative Literature and Culture Studies of the 18th century invite proposals for the following collaborative panel:

New Philology, Media Ecology

This panel invites papers that engage media philology (Medienphilologie) and/or media ecology in their relation and application to 18th-century literary texts. What is media philology? Why is the nexus of philology and media of current interest? Why does the Anglo-American world embrace media ecology rather than philology? And what are the unique contributions of media philology and media ecology, respectively? All approaches addressing these questions are welcome, particularly in relation to media and mediality, intermediality, the archive, philology and antiquarian studies, and disciplinary boundaries within the Humanities.1-page abstracts by March 15, 2017, to Birgit Tautz at btautz@bowdoin.edu and Nicholas Rennie at nicholas.rennie@rutgers.edu. 

Call for Papers: MLA 2018

Panel sponsored by the Goethe Society of North America, proposed by Fritz Breithaupt (University of Indiana)

Goethe's Narrative Forms

Given Goethe’s sense of style and his many astounding insights, it is easy to forget Goethe the story-teller. Narratives are everywhere in Goethe’s work, including his poetry that is rich in implicit narratives. But what are the larger or smaller narrative patterns that emerge from his stories? What is his (implicit) theory of narrative events in Die Novelle but also his dramas? What are the specific ways the perspectives of characters make up stories in Goethe’s texts? How do suspense, doubt, ambiguity, and plurality of possible versions establish the narratives in his texts? What role does retrospection and framing play? Which affects structure the plot lines? What is the narrative interplay between the every-day life and the exceptional mental states of the characters?Please send abstracts of approx. 1 page and bio blurb to Fritz Breithaupt at fbreitha@indiana.edu by March 17.