Goethe YearbookPub Date : 2021-06-18DOI: 10.1353/gyr.2021.0030
Tanvi Solanki
{"title":"China in the German Enlightenment ed. by Bettina Brandt and Daniel Leonhard Purdy (review)","authors":"Tanvi Solanki","doi":"10.1353/gyr.2021.0030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gyr.2021.0030","url":null,"abstract":"clear, if Santayana’s text is imperfect, it is rhetorically magnificent in its imperfection and, as such, a useful foil for budding scholars. The section on Goethe’s Faust, for example, could easily serve as a usefully problematic commentary in an undergraduate seminar on Goethe. For the professor who wishes her students to see Goethe’s prophetic comprehension of capitalism, colonialism, and environmental destruction, Santayana’s text-immanent interpretations are a sharpening stone against which to hone one’s arguments. His essay reminds us that literary criticism, to the extent that it constitutes a phenomenological exercise, rises and falls on the merits of its rhetoric. He may have little new to say to scholars of these poets, but he says it so well that the experience of reading him is its own pleasure. Santayana’s essay appears in an MIT critical edition that comes equipped with an excellent introduction by James Seaton, as well as a set of useful appendices, including a chronology of Santayana’s life, extensive notes and a bibliography, and textual commentary, variants, and an index.","PeriodicalId":385309,"journal":{"name":"Goethe Yearbook","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132892782","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Goethe YearbookPub Date : 2021-06-18DOI: 10.1353/gyr.2021.0006
Carrie Collenberg-González
{"title":"The Daisy Oracle: A New Gretchenfrage in Goethe's Faust","authors":"Carrie Collenberg-González","doi":"10.1353/gyr.2021.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gyr.2021.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The daisy oracle in Goethe's Faust: Eine Tragödie (1808) is one of the most prominent instances of flower divination in literary history and is crucial to understanding the Gretchen tragedy. By examining its origin and evolution in German literature and its role within the drama, this article argues that the daisy oracle offers critical insight into Gretchen's agency, desire, and resistance to eighteenth-century gender conventions, and poses an alternative Gretchenfrage that demonstrates the character's relationship to love, desire, and the divine. Gretchen, who embodies the characteristics of purity and innocence represented by the daisy, is also the agent who destroys the daisy and thus manipulates her own fate, setting the plot in motion. The coda of this paper outlines some of the most significant iterations of twentieth-century daisy oracles that borrow their form from Goethe, demonstrating the enduring resonance of the daisy oracle and its connotations and positing the daisy oracle as an allegory for the self-destructing potential of humankind's striving to manifest its own ideals and nevertheless achieve redemption.","PeriodicalId":385309,"journal":{"name":"Goethe Yearbook","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115745808","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Goethe YearbookPub Date : 2021-06-18DOI: 10.1353/gyr.2021.0025
Daniel L. Purdy
{"title":"Poetologie der Stimmung. Ein ästhetisches Phänomen der frühen Goethezeit by Stefan Hajduk (review)","authors":"Daniel L. Purdy","doi":"10.1353/gyr.2021.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gyr.2021.0025","url":null,"abstract":"and similitudes that future poets might emulate,” by the late twentieth century, Arab poets, according to Hassan, have increasingly thrown off the yoke of meter, favoring, for instance, prose poems, and thereby eroding the vibrancy of literary models that once characterized Eastern cultures. Bidney’s mammoth translation project includes a 200-page section of his own rhymed commentary on each of the twelve books of Goethe’s Divan, which indicates that English-language poets continue to experiment with foreign poetic forms in an aspirational manner. To the extent that such poetry enriches the resources of English as a poetic medium, the result may be reserved for cognoscenti. This is where Goethe’s use of the term epochs in connection with literary translation is apt. As Weidner writes, Goethe assumed that “languages and literatures follow a ‘natural’ course of development which is reflected . . . ultimately in a continuous assimilation of the various national literatures into each other, a process for which Goethe later coined the term ‘world literature.’” Did Goethe think that national literatures would die out, that they would be replaced by a world language, for example, by English, which is becoming the kind of “pure” language of which Benjamin wrote, one that could overcome “Babelesque linguistic diversity”? To the extent that English is on its way to becoming everyone’s “original,” Ormsby’s translation might be placed in Goethe’s third epoch.","PeriodicalId":385309,"journal":{"name":"Goethe Yearbook","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115286795","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Goethe YearbookPub Date : 2021-06-18DOI: 10.1353/gyr.2021.0018
M. Dupree
{"title":"Goethe's Talking Books: Print Culture and the Problem of Literary Orality","authors":"M. Dupree","doi":"10.1353/gyr.2021.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gyr.2021.0018","url":null,"abstract":"over the Past tWo decades, there has been an upswing in scholarship on literary orality in the long eighteenth century, focusing in particular on the recitation and declamation of poetry. Much of this research takes as its starting point the reassessment of the “ear” and a related concern with the “tones” of language in Herder and Klopstock’s poetics. In an analysis of Klopstock’s 1774 Gelehrtenrepublik (The Republic of Letters), Karl-Heinz Göttert summarizes this shift:","PeriodicalId":385309,"journal":{"name":"Goethe Yearbook","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122425509","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Goethe YearbookPub Date : 2021-06-18DOI: 10.1353/gyr.2021.0002
K. Schutjer
{"title":"Heaven Help Us! Journals! Calendars!: Goethe and Schiller's Xenien as Circulatory Intervention","authors":"K. Schutjer","doi":"10.1353/gyr.2021.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gyr.2021.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In their Xenien project, Goethe and Schiller weaponized the classical epigrammatic distich on behalf of their own vision of a public sphere. In response to an oversaturated market in journals and in the context of falling subscription numbers for their own journal Die Horen, they published hundreds of epigrams attacking rival journals and authors. Taking a cue from new formalist approaches, this article analyzes the specific structural and rhetorical affordances of the distich and the broader formal strategies the authors deploy in this cultural intervention. The generic resources of the epigram are deployed to disrupt a commercial circulation generated by second-rate journals and their networks of \"Philistine\" writers and critics, to deconstruct false paradigms and overblown conceptions, to parody the overaccelerated or excessively sluggish pace of cultural production and exchange, and to expose those forces bent on overturning established social or political hierarchies. At the same time, the epigrams aim to set in motion a more rhythmic circulation that aligns with natural processes and classical antecedents, is shaped by the reciprocal exchange characterizing Goethe and Schiller's own friendship, gives rise to more elastic and internally differentiated conceptions of the whole, and ultimately sustains rather than overturns societal structures.","PeriodicalId":385309,"journal":{"name":"Goethe Yearbook","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126096378","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Goethe YearbookPub Date : 2021-06-18DOI: 10.1353/gyr.2021.0024
Elizabeth Powers
{"title":"West-Eastern Divan. Complete, Annotated New Translation, including the \"Notes and Essays\" & the Unpublished Poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and: A New Divan: A Lyrical Dialogue Between East & West ed. by Barbara Schwepcke and Bill Swainson (review)","authors":"Elizabeth Powers","doi":"10.1353/gyr.2021.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gyr.2021.0024","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":385309,"journal":{"name":"Goethe Yearbook","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134112437","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Goethe YearbookPub Date : 2021-06-18DOI: 10.1353/gyr.2021.0014
S. Franzel, Ilinca Iurascu, Petra S. McGillen
{"title":"Media Inventories of the Nineteenth Century: A Report from Two Workshops","authors":"S. Franzel, Ilinca Iurascu, Petra S. McGillen","doi":"10.1353/gyr.2021.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gyr.2021.0014","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":385309,"journal":{"name":"Goethe Yearbook","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115714589","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Goethe YearbookPub Date : 2021-06-18DOI: 10.1353/gyr.2021.0011
Ethan Blass
{"title":"The Men Who Knew Too Much: Reading Goethe's \"Erlkönig\" in Light of Hitchcock","authors":"Ethan Blass","doi":"10.1353/gyr.2021.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gyr.2021.0011","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:There are a number of resonances between Goethe's ballad \"Erlkönig\" and Hitchcock's 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much. Most strikingly, the father figures in these works can both be understood as having \"too much\" knowledge. Drawing on the work of René Girard, this article accounts for such resonances by showing that both the film and the poem trace a set of relations between knowledge, ritual, and violence. While, in both works, the knowledge of these fathers prevents a ritual from taking shape, without the outlet of ritual, violent tensions only build. In the poem, this leads to the death of a child, whereas the film obviates a similar catastrophe by subtly allowing ritual to resurface.","PeriodicalId":385309,"journal":{"name":"Goethe Yearbook","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123334869","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Goethe YearbookPub Date : 2021-06-18DOI: 10.1353/gyr.2021.0033
Katherine H. Paul
{"title":"The Faust Legend: From Marlowe and Goethe to Contemporary Drama and Film by Sara Munson Deats (review)","authors":"Katherine H. Paul","doi":"10.1353/gyr.2021.0033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gyr.2021.0033","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":385309,"journal":{"name":"Goethe Yearbook","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127132481","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}