GSA 2018
Goethe Exhibition in Bonn, May-Sept. 2019
Goethe. Transformation of the World
bundeskunsthalle
Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, Germany
17 May - 15 September 2019
Johann Wolfgang Goethe is the world’s best-known poet of the German tongue. A literary celebrity by the age of 25, he lived to see his fame spread all over Europe. His works were translated into countless languages. Figures like Werther or Faust found their way into every creative discipline and all sectors of popular culture. More than any other artist of his time, Goethe reflected the dramatic changes that sent shockwaves through the political, economical and cultural foundations of Europe around 1800. Goethe was not only a critical observer of the dawn of the modern world, but also a versatile artist who continues to inspire writers, painters, sculptors, composers, photographers and film directors.
The Bundeskunsthalle and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar are devoting a major exhibition to the artist Goethe. Around three hundred objects in the exhibition shed light on his biography, his age at the dawn of our modern era and the uniquely powerful impact of his work
An exhibition of the Bundeskunsthalle and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar in cooperation with the Freies Deutsches Hochstift, Frankfurt, the Goethe-Museum Düsseldorf and the Museo Casa di Goethe, Rom under the patronage of the Federal President of Germany.
Invitation to Submit your Work to the GYB
Dear colleagues,With vol. 26 in production, we want to reach out again and invite you to submit your work for consideration in the next Goethe Yearbook (to appear in 2020). Please send us manuscripts by February 15, 2019.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 and anonymized for review. Manuscript submissions should be no longer than 8,500 words.
Patricia Anne SimpsonUniversity of Nebraska
Birgit TautzBowdoin College
With very best wishes for the holiday season and 2019,Birgit and Patty
Call for Papers: GSA 2019
GSNA-Sponsored Seminar for the 2019 GSA Conference, Portland, OR, 3-6 October 2019Deadline: 26 January 2019
Goethe as a Heterodox Thinker
Conveners: Clark Muenzer, University of Pittsburgh, clark.muenzer@gmail.comKarin Schutjer, University of Oklahoma, kschutjer@ou.eduJohn H. Smith, University of California, Irvine, jhsmith@uci.eduThis seminar will explore Goethe’s unique contribution to philosophical discourse. During the 2018 GSA, four panels were dedicated to “Goethe’s Philosophical Concepts.” They launched a multi-year project, a Goethe Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts, that will provide an ongoing online and print-on-demand collection of articles highlighting the novelty of Goethe’s thought. The project is inspired in part by Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of philosophy as the “creation of concepts,” and in part by Goethe himself, who wrote: “Kein Wort steht still sondern es rückt durch den Gebrauch von seinem anfänglichen Platz eher hinab als hinauf, eher ins Schlechtere als ins Bessere, ins Engere als ins Weitere, und an der Wandelbarkeit des Worts läßt sich die Wandelbarkeit der Begriffe erkennen” (Max. und Reflex. 983). The success of the panels encourages us to gather Goethezeit scholars of all ranks to discuss Goethe as heterodox thinker against the background of philosophical doxa.Format: Each convener will provide a short reading by Goethe or from the philosophical tradition with a brief explanation of the selection. Each participant will write a short position paper on one of the readings (500-1000 words) to be distributed in advance. Each day of the seminar, one convener is responsible for moderating the discussion.
Call for Papers: GSA 2019
GSNA-Sponsored Panel for the 2019 GSA Conference, Portland, OR, 3-6 October 2019
Realism in the Age of Goethe and Its Legacy
In a conversation with Eckermann in December 1826, Goethe expressed contempt for readers of his 1796 epic poem Hermann und Dorothea who attempted to merely uncover the reality behind poetry: “Man will die Wahrheit, man will die Wirklichkeit und verdirbt dadurch die Poesie” (Goethe HA, 2:738). This contempt for a plain realism as a trajectory for poetry with its implicit assertion of poetry’s own epistemic value, however, is not just an echo of Schiller’s earlier claim that poetry has to free herself of all historical contingencies in order to constitute a poetic truth of her own right. Encompassing both aesthetics and his idea of sciences, Goethe by contrast maintained his idea of “hartnäckige[r] Realismus” (ibid., 10:541.). The romantics’ position towards realism and idealism was perhaps more ambivalent, but they too came to favor what Manfred Frank describes as “erkenntnistheoretischen Realismus” (Unendliche Annäherung, p. 663).The renegotiation of the relationship between poetry and reality was first necessitated by the liquidation of traditional concepts of rhetoric and allegory in the course of the 18th century; major systems of reference for poetic concepts of truth and meaning had eroded by 1800, making way for various competing schemes, which were unified, however, in their affirmative or critical stance towards idealism. Thus, Goethe’s apodictic proposition (and the conceptualization of poetry in general behind it) certainly has reinforced the alleged divide behind Weimar Classicism and Romanticism on the one hand, and 19th century literary Realism on the other in modern periodization of literary history with its claim of two distinct literary epistemologies of the two periods.This panel explores how poets from 1800 on conceptualized reality in and of literature. We want to address questions of how philosophical concepts of realism and idealism shaped and calibrated poetic forms of realism in Classicism and Romanticism, and how these literary movements approached their own historical reality to which they certainly reacted (and which, in turn, they shaped). And, by contrast, we will ask how ‘realistic’ Realism actually is, and to what end (if at all) Realism utilizes earlier poetic strategies / models for its own constitution of poetic reality.Please send an abstract of no more than 350 words to Jan Oliver Jost-Fritz (jostfritz@etsu.edu) and Christian Weber (cweber@fsu.edu) by 31 January 2019.