Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Philosophy ed. by Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge and C. Allen Speight (review)

Abstract

biography of a particular concept, or set of concepts, it becomes apparent that the authors often mean very different things when they say Klassik, Klassizismus, or Klassizität. While some, Pfotenhauer, for example, focus on classicism in the narrower sense of the word, that is, on the eighteenth-century conception of classical, primarily Greek, art and literature, others, Gschwandtner and Degner, among others, address the oppressive presence of a national canon, Goethe’s, in particular. some contributions hardly address Klassizität at all. michael Bies’s chapter on Goethe and Kathrin Rosenfield’s on Hölderlin are both excellent interpretations of Goethe’s concept of Handwerk and Hölderlin’s famous translations of sophocles, but the battles they zoom in on are not really between classicism and anticlassicism. Both texts are convincing and thought-provoking studies, but they significantly widen the scope of the book as a whole. Furthermore, one or two possible topics remain underdeveloped. schiller plays a surprisingly small role in the various discussions of the German classicist tradition, whereas Grillparzer is only mentioned in passing by the editors. nor is the polemic entanglement of classicism and romanticism, to which the chapters occasionally refer, dealt with sufficiently. in fact, the conflict between classicist Weimar and romantic Jena contains everything that the book focuses on: the drawing of arbitrary dividing lines, the use and abuse of the classical tradition, changing loyalties within the various constellations, etc. Ehrmann devotes no more than approximately two pages to this historically crucial conflict. instead, one has to turn to sabine schneider’s important 2002 essay, “Klassizismus und Romantik,” or to Harald Tausch’s 2011 book, Literatur um 1800, for more thorough investigations of the “klassisch-romantischen Doppelepoche.” With that said, to anyone interested in historical disputes over art—and quite frankly, who isn’t interested?—Ehrmann and Wolf’s volume offers important insights into the unending conflict over a key concept in aesthetics as well as innovative interpretations of individual contributions to this conflict. in spite of new trends and ideals, Klassizität proves to be an inescapable point of reference, regardless of whether you side with classicism or with anticlassicism or find yourself lost in the no man’s land between these front lines of aesthetics.