Allegorie/Symbol (Allegory/Symbol)

Abstract

For Goethe, allegory and symbol function as poles of the dyad “sinnliche Darstellung” (representation). He introduced the contrasting pair in the second half of the 1790s, in the context of his project for a German classical aesthetics with Friedrich Schiller, his translation of Germaine de Staël’s Essai sur les fictions (Essay on Fiction), his ongoing work on morphology and optics, and his engagement with idealist philosophy. Despite the priority given to the symbol in Goethe’s scientific writings, he applied the term only occasionally to literature; he remained committed to the sophisticated allegorical poetics and imagery of the high baroque drama (e.g. Shakespeare, Calderón) in essentially all his mature work and was sympathetic to its use by the German Romantics. While Goethe’s own terminology often wavered between the poles of symbol and allegory, his distinction became the standard theme in discussions of poetic representation for more than a century, with symbol heavily prioritized over allegory, and it remains a theme in Goethe scholarship. The post-modernist return to allegory in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man is more a skeptical version of the Goethean symbol than earlier definitions of either allegory or symbol.