CFP for 2021 Atkins Goethe Conference

Goethe’s Things

November 5-7, 2021
The University of Chicago

Please note, this is a second call for papers for the Atkins conference that was originally scheduled for November 2020. If your paper was submitted and accepted in 2020, you may choose to retain it, or you may submit a new proposal.

“ich bin den ganzen Tag in einem Gespräch mit den Dingen”

At a moment when material culture itself was in a state of flux and transformation, Novalis rather back-handedly compared Goethe’s achievements on the literary marketplace with Josiah Wedgwood’s pre-eminence in marketing classicizing luxury goods. Goethe’s place in a changing new world of commodities has been central to a number of significant scholarly studies on topics such as fashion, entertainment, collecting, and luxury over the past two decades. The recent material turn in the humanities more broadly has given rise to multiple new approaches to, and theorizations of, objects, things, and stuff, from thing theory to the new materialisms, often emphasizing the lively or agentic quality of things. These may shed additional light on Goethe’s self-described “conversation with things.” We invite submissions that reflect upon Goethe and his age from a material perspective. Challenging the notion that a turn to the material world represents a shift away from more theoretical concerns, Goethe’s sensual orientation to the “thingly” world suggests that we consider as well how the material may also be in dialog with the philosophical during this period. And, on the other hand, we may wish to consider how “weakly” theoretical artifacts in fact call attention to knowledge production in specialized fields.
 
Submissions may take the form of complete sessions or individual papers. Topics that might be considered include: objects, subjectivity, affect, the sensorium; collections, exhibitions, galleries, studios, studies, libraries, archives, theatres; architecture; texts and images as material artefacts; paper; textiles; domestic culture and lifestyle; fashion; consumer goods and culture; copies and reproductions; the reception of antique artefacts; gardens; science (mineralogy, chemistry, etc.); instruments and apparatus (musical, scientific, etc.).

We are also opening a new subtopic for papers on disease and epidemics in the Goethezeit, a subject which has numerous material as well as discursive implications.

Please send 200-250 word proposals to: atkins2020@lists.uchicago.edu, by March 1, 2021.

2019 Essay Prizes Announced

GSNA prize-winning essays awarded in October 2020 for essays published in 2019.

Presented by Heather I. Sullivan at the October 2020 GSNA business meeting with thanks to fellow committee members and readers, Sue Gustafson and Joe O’Neill.

The top awards come with a cash prize. Please join us in celebrating these four authors and their wonderful essays!

Richard Sussman essay prize in Science

Andrea Meyertholen, "Zum ersten Mal sah ich ein Bild" Goethe's Cognitive Viewing Subject as Scientist and Artist" in Seminar 55.3 (2019), 203-228.

Meyertholen’s essay cogently illuminates Goethe’s theories of perception in his essay, “Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt.” Building on a wide array of the existing scholarship on this famous essay, she opens—with panache—a new horizon outlining Goethe's focus on the importance of spectators' cognitive and subjective viewing, which, she claims, allows later artists like Kandinsky to develop startling ideas in abstract art. Reinterpreting Goethe’s essay, Meyertholen demonstrates how Goethe’s call for viewers to allow objects to appear in their own apparently “natural order” actually opens up a gap of subjective and abstract connections that can also describe Kandinsky’s encounter with Monet’s work. Indeed, Meyertholen adds rich nuance to our study of the importance of perception in Goethe's scientific works and how his focus on the creative cognitive process of the viewing subject was crucial for the emergence of abstract art. In our era of grappling with scientific perception and its radical reshaping of the world alongside debates on the role of aesthetic thinking, we are much enriched by Meyertholen’s insights into human subjects, subjectivity, and aesthetic possibilities in cognition.

GSNA ESSAY PRIZE

Daniel Nolan, "'I too am Naked': Kleist, Habermas, and the Epigrammatic Exposure of Literary Honesty" in the German Studies Review 42.1 (2019): 19-36

In his luminous essay, Nolan describes the epigrams of Goethe and Kleist as stylized confessions presenting claims of sincerity and textual honesty. According to Nolan, “the author’s relation to truth and their capacity for penetrating insight appears as a moment of privacy” that occurs in the very public form of epigrams in the newly developing literary marketplace. Importantly, Nolan posits that Kleist’s epigrams “point to a corrective response to Habermas’s broader claims that aesthetic thinking can be characterized primarily in terms of its reliance on stable forms of truthfulness” (my emphasis). Nolan thereby revisits and reshapes Habermas’s theory of the emerging “public authorship” showing us that Goethe plays with honesty and self-performance, while Kleist “undermines the notion that truthfulness provides a stable frame for evaluating aesthetic works.” Such insights are invaluable today as our experiences with confessional forms of “public truths and sincerity” yet again are in wild transition in the media and marketplace.e

Anna-Lisa Baumeister, "'Sie scheint auch mehr zu donnern und blitzen, als zu reden.' Zur Meteorologisierung der Sprache im Drama der 1770er Jahre" in The Germanic Review 94.3 (2019): 209-227.

Baumeister brilliantly reshapes readings of aesthetic thinking, in this case with her close study of the idea of “wettern” in German drama of the 1770s by Goethe, Klinger, Lenz, and Herder. Instead of following traditional readings of weather and storms in dramas that look to religious and rhetorical origins or allegorical function of individual events, Baumeister takes the newly more scientific discourse of weather in the era seriously in relation to the power of words. She reads “wettern” literally in terms of the “then-emerging meteorological science, whose hallmark is the synthesis of formerly separate phenomena (e.g., lightning, clouds, sunlight, storms) into a continuous process with a unified internal dynamic.” This united dynamic, when enacted on the stage, translates into greater potential for the power of poetic and aesthetic language (a la Herder). Aided by technological theatrics incorporating the formally divine power to drive thunder and lightning into a systematic, semi-natural unity, poetic language and aesthetic performance are themselves transformed into a newly dynamic kind of power. 

Honoroable Mention – W. Daniel Wilson, "'Global Mission': The Goethe Society of Weimar in the Third Reich" in the Goethe Yearbook 26 (2019): 21-37.

Wilson’s impressively-researched exploration of the Goethe Society of Weimar's archives provides a detailed outline of the Society’s concessions to the Third Reich and its antidemocratic and antisemitic leadership during that time. While attempting to maintain status, the Weimar group sought National Socialist support while also hoping to keep, at least initially, international participation of wealthy Jewish members especially in the United States. Wilson demonstrates clearly “that the Goethe Society had a privileged place in the Third Reich,” due to its “reinterpretation of Goethe as a precursor to the Third Reich.” Able to maintain an illusion of autonomy based on the cultural capital of Goethe and its “global mission,” the Weimar Goethe Society “performed a sort of Selbstgleichschaltung” by incorporating National Socialist ideology in its publications. Wilson’s documentation of this dark era provides new insights into academic power struggles in times of dire political chaos.

Annual Business Meeting and Roundtable on "Play in the Age of Goethe"

The Goethe Society invites you to its annual business meeting, followed by a special roundtable discussion to celebrate the publication of the first edited volume in its book series, Play in the Age of Goethe: Theories, Narratives, and Practices of Play around 1800. Both events will be held in Zoom.

The business meeting (3:00-4:00 p.m. CST) will feature brief updates from Goethe Society officers, including on the Goethe-Atkins Conference that has been rescheduled for November 2021 at the University of Chicago. The winners of our essay prizes will also be announced, so please be ready to raise a glass!

Following the business meeting, join us for a roundtable discussion on play in the Goethezeit (4:15-5:15 p.m. CST) featuring the editors of the new volume along with several of the contributors. The format will be conversational, with audience participation welcome and encouraged.

While we hope that you will attend both events, you are also welcome to attend one or the other.

***Please note that all event times have been given for Central Standard Time, and please adjust accordingly depending on your time zone!***

If you would like to attend either event, please contact Elliott Schreiber, Executive Secretary  (elschreiber@vassar.edu), who will send you the Zoom link and answer any questions you may have.

We look forward to seeing you on October 9!

In Memoriam: Remembering Hans Reiss

Hans Reiss, who died on April 2 at age 97, outshone the dry facts of his vita as greatly as the 373 pages of his lively autobiography (2009) outweigh his entry in Wikipedia. Though confined in recent years to a wheelchair in the Heidelberg apartment that he shared with his wife Linda, a gifted artist, he carried on a spirited correspondence with his many friends in Germany and abroad; and his conversation was never less than animated, whether with colleagues on intellectual topics or with my ten-year-old granddaughter, whom he charmed.

Hans’s autobiography (Erinnerungen aus 85 Jahren), which amounts to a survey of international Germanistics over the past fifty years and includes conversations with major figures from European political, religious, and intellectual life, describes his flight in 1939 at age sixteen from his parents’ home in Mannheim to Ireland, where he studied literature at Trinity College Dublin. With his Ph.D. in German he taught first at Trinity College and then at the London School of Economics and the University of London. In 1958 he moved to McGill University in Montreal and later, from 1965 until his retirement in 1988, chaired the German Department at the University of Bristol. Active during his retirement years as a guest professor and lecturer at some 80 universities, he and Linda moved in 2009 to Heidelberg, where he spent his final years.

While highly regarded as a Goethe scholar—his Goethe’s Novels (1969, 1971) was voted “Outstanding Book of the Year 1972”, and in 1997 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Goethe-Gesellschaft Weimar—his interests embraced a much larger intellectual range with influential books on Kant’s Political Writings (1970), aesthetics, political romanticism, and modern writers from Nietzsche to Brecht: all written in the same clear and often witty style as his conversation.

Hans will be sorely missed by many—not only as a dear and loyal friend and supportive colleague but also as a representative of that dwindling group of European intellectuals with a broad grasp of both detail and context.

Theodore Ziolkowski

Call for Papers for a GSNA-Sponsored Panel at the 2021 MLA Convention (Toronto)

Call for Papers

The Goethe Society of North America is proud to sponsor a panel at the Modern Language Association Convention in Toronto (January 7-10, 2021):

Age and Aging in Texts by Goethe and His Contemporaries

Goethe was one of the relatively few of his generation who enjoyed an extended life span and it comes as no surprise that reflections on age and the aging process are frequent in his work. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister undoubtedly had significant impact on the establishment of an ideological context in which the young bourgeois individual was expected to leave the parents’ house in order to become an autonomous being and, at the same time, a productive member of society (cf. Franco Moretti, Andrea Charise). Considering this framework, the elderly person who might suffer diminished economic productivity and lose autonomy when returning to the family or other support networks might seem a failure. However, while the Meister novel follows a young hero, in Goethe’s Elective Affinities the narrator takes a more critical position vis-à -vis Eduard’s enthusiasm for everything that is young and new while older individuals like the gardener highlight the values of maturity and duration. In other texts by Goethe, old age offers alternative perspectives from which modernity can be challenged. At the end of Faust II, Philemon and Baucis in their old age are strong reminders of the victims of the colonizing project driven by an ideology of progress. Even in those places where aging is depicted explicitly as a burden and obstacle (The Man of Fifty Years) new happiness is found once age is accepted and endorsed.
 
Against the backdrop of recent scholarship in historical and literary studies on old age in Western Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries (cf. Andrea Charise, Karen Chase, Susannah Ottaway), this panel seeks to explore presentations and conceptualizations of age and aging in texts by Goethe and his contemporaries. We welcome proposals from a wide range of texts and we are particularly interested in contributions that explore the topic at the intersection of literature and medicine. Beyond our overarching question of how age and aging were experienced, represented, and conceptualized in texts by Goethe and his contemporaries, topics may include (but are not limited to): What kind of values are associated with old age? How do these values inform social (in particular intergenerational) interactions (respect, stigmatization, care)? How are the categories of age, class, and gender connected (the widow, the alms receiver, the old sage)? What kind of strategies are employed in order to deal with old age or to postpone its onset (cosmetics, diet, exercise)? Is there an aesthetics of old age? What ideal of health, and what “welfare system,” emerge from the texts, and what kind of power and power discourses are implied? How do the authors deal with the pain and deterioration usually associated with aging? What are the connections between medical and literary texts regarding the conceptualization of old age?

Please send an abstract of no more than 350 words to Christine Lehleiter (christine.lehleiter@utoronto.ca) and Elisa Leonzio (elisa.leonzio@unito.it).

Deadline: March 15, 2020