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.
From the President
As President of the North American Goethe Society, I had the privilege of participating in the 85th Hauptversammlung of the Goethe-Gesellschaft in Weimar from June 7-10. The Goethe-Gesellschaft serves a broad lay audience by drawing them to Weimar in order to engage in conversations with artists, teachers, other readers, and researchers. Unlike American scholarly societies, the Goethe-Gesellschaft speaks to a still robust Bildungsbürgertum that continues to celebrate Weimar culture. In addition to bringing scholars and connoisseurs together, the Hauptversammlung also draws international representatives of other Goethe societies. This year many panels focused on Weltliteratur and the global reception of his work, so that discussions took on a very comparative approach. One important similarity between the North American Society and the Gesellschaft in Weimar is the shared concern to attract young readers of eighteenth-century German literature.Our own 2017 Atkins Goethe Conference is now fast approaching. From November 2-5, we will be gathering at Penn State University in the Nittany Lion Inn for meetings, lectures, dinners, and a dissertation workshop. We look forward to your arrival in Central Pennsylvania at the height of the Fall season. Our conference will consider the topic “Re-Orientations around Goethe” in order to examine the eighteenth-century’s many kinds of revolutions in conjunction with our own era’s new critical approaches to German literature, politics, science, and art. Directors at Large John Smith and Heidi Schlipphacke took charge of reviewing the paper proposals and organizing the panels. This year the Society was able to provide travel funds for foreign scholars, graduate students and non-tenure track professors to attend the Atkins conference. These funds were drawn largely from royalties generated by the online publication of the Goethe Yearbook. Vice President Catriona MacLeod will also award prizes during the conference for the best essays in eighteenth-century studies. Our connection to German scholarship will be well maintained through two keynote speakers, Helmut Schneider from the University of Bonn and Eva Geulen from the Humboldt University in Berlin.At the Atkins conference, we will also begin an important transition among the positions of our Society’s officers. Patricia Simpson and Birgit Tautz, the new editors of the Yearbook, will also be attending the conference as they take on their new responsibilities. Please feel free to speak with them about their plans and your interest in publishing in the Yearbook. For the last five years, Elisabeth Krimmer and Adrian Daub have done an excellent job editing the Goethe Yearbook. They have published lively and rigorous volumes. Because of their hard work the Yearbook continues to hold a prominent position in eighteenth-century studies not only in the United States and Canada but also in Germany. We are most grateful for their attentive work and we wish them success as they continue in their own scholarship and teaching.A few last technical details: The lecture rooms will all be equipped with video projectors, but we ask that you bring along your own laptop computers if you want to show images. Please make sure to register in advance so that we can pass your meal preferences along to the caterers. As our Society continues to attract new scholars, we urge you to renew your membership. Finally, Daylight saving time will come to an end on November 5, so please make sure to adjust your clocks and enjoy the extra hour.
Daniel PurdyPennsylvania State University
From the Yearbook Editors
Volume 25 of the Goethe Yearbook features a special section on acoustics around 1800, edited by Mary Helen Dupree, which includes, among others, contributions on sound and listening in Ludwig Tieck’s Der blonde Eckbert (Robert Ryder) and on the role of the tympanum in Herder’s aesthetic theory (Tyler Whitney).The volume also contains essays on Goethe and stage sequels (Matthew Birkhold), on figures of armament in eighteenth-century German drama (Susanne Fuchs), on the dialectics of Bildung in Wilhelm Meister (Galia Benziman), on the Gothic motif in Goethe’s Faust and “Von deutscher Baukunst” (Jessica Resvick), on Goethe and Salomon Maimon (Jason Yonover), on Goethe’s “Novelle” (Ehrhard Bahr), on Schiller’s Bürger critique (Hans Richard Brittnacher), on Charlotte Schiller and Charlotte von Stein (Linda Dietrick), on the international world order in Goethe’s Iphigenie (Chenxi Tang), and on gender and violence in Iphigenie (Patricia Simpson).Volume 25 is the last one in our five-year tenure as editors and we would like to thank everybody who has written or reviewed articles for us and everybody who read these publications. It has been a privilege to edit the Goethe Yearbook and a wonderful opportunity to get to know many eighteenth-century scholars and their work. We will miss the Yearbook, but are delighted to know that, with the appointment of Birgit Tautz and Patricia Simpson, it will be in excellent hands.
Adrian DaubStanford University
Elisabeth KrimmerUniversity of California at Davis
From the Executive Secretary
As I am stepping down as Executive Secretary, I’d like to thank all members for the always constructive cooperation. And, of course, as we are looking forward to the Atkins Goethe Conference at PSU, I don't want to forget to mention our excellent panels at the GSA in Atlanta: two on Goethean thought, organized by Michael Saman and Fritz Breithaupt, and one on Semiosis and Poiesis in the Age of Goethe (1750–1830), organized by Christian Weber.The next call for proposals is coming up soon: 1 December 2017, for MLA 2019.
Birgit TautzBowdoin College