Goethe at 250: London Symposium/Goethe mit 250: Londoner Symposium by T. J. Reed, Martin Swales, Jeremy Adler

Abstract

504 Reviews provided). We learn a great deal about the history ofthe teaching of mathematics, but though it tells us something about the language of mathematical books (for example, concerning oral features, the use of the imperative and the subjunctive), whether the study makes a really significant contribution to linguistics is not obvious. Institute of Germanic Studies, London John L. Flood Goethe at 230: London Symposium/Goethe mit 250: Londoner Symposium. Ed. by T. J. Reed, Martin Swales, and Jeremy Adler. (Publications of the Institute of Germanic Studies, 75) Munich: Iudicium. 2000. 305 pp. ?38.50. ISBN 389129 -049-7 (pbk). This readable collection of talks from the symposium held by the English Goethe Society in April 1999 claims no special focus, other than to demonstrate 'the range and vitality, though not necessarily the limits, of present British interest in Goethe' (p. 7). A major anniversary is a good time for taking stock, and many of these essays do just that, in three differentways. The firstthree essays place Goethe at the most general level. In 'Goethe's Analysis of Modernity' Martin Swales contrasts the limitations of bourgeois modernity in the Wilhelm Meister novels with its expansiveness in Faust. Deftly combining survey, genre analysis, and apt details, he identifies the tension between action and reflection that characterizes Goethe's view of modernity. Next Katrin Kohl focuses on Goethe as 'national' poet to question the cliche that his 'Naturpoesie' represents a categorical break with all previous poetic language and to consider how Goethe himself promoted the accepted view. Hans Hahn's 'Kranke Marmorbilder und kinderlose Worte', fi? nally, surveys the semantic complex health/illness/statue in Goethe and the Romantic generation. The essays in the second group place Goethe more specifically in relation to a par? ticular text or movement. W. E. Yates describes Goethe's reception by the Austrian dramatists, while Paul Bishop discusses the importance of Goethe for Freud, espe? cially 'Die Natur', which Freud took to be Goethe's. Laura Martin considers possible feminist responses to Wilhelm Meister s Wanderjahre', after surveying how Goethe seems both pro- and anti-feminist, she concludes that the real issue forGoethe was to broach the problem rather than solve it. Henk de Berg uses communications theory to argue that Heine's apparently contradictory views of Goethe are really context determined . Duncan Large revisits the question of Goethe's 'plagiarisms' from Laurence Sterne in the Wanderjahre (concluding that Goethe did not have strong feelings about intellectual property). David Hill locates the coherence of 'Aus Goethes Brieftasche ' in Goethe's response to the poetics of Louis-Sebastien Mercier, to whose treatise on drama Goethe's own essay was originally appended. John R. Williams offersdetailed evidence that the Baccalaureus in the second act of Faust II may be as much satire on Schopenhauer as on the usual suspect, Fichte. Hilda Brown focuses on Die Wahlverwandtschaften in the context of landscape gardening and in relation to Goethe's own theory of dilettantism, while Leonard Olschner surveys Goethe's thinking about translation in 1828. The remaining essays deal with significantproblems or themes in Goethe. Matthew Bell demonstrates from samples of love verse over Goethe's entire career how love is always grounded in nature, even when it seems most metaphysical. Ouida Taaffe raises the (for Goethe studies) unusual question of hate, which she locates in the failure of the renunciation demanded by the collision of real and ideal; the discussion focuses on Werther,where Taaffe identifies Werther's narcissism as a form of hate. In a variant, Sarah Colvin discusses Charlotte von Stein's satire against Goethe, Neues MLR, 98.2, 2003 505 Freiheitssystem oder Die Verschwbrunggegen die Liebe. Riidiger Gorner sensitively surveys the morphology of repetition in Goethe, which takes the forms of repetition, memory, and parody at differentpoints in his development. K. F. Hilliard discusses the tension between discretion and speaking in the last of the Rbmische Elegien and moves from details of textual history and analogues in Goethe's earlier epigrams toward the larger question of the role of 'offenbares Geheimnis' and of fiction in resolving paradoxical oppositions. In similar fashion R. C. Ockenden's analysis of the backgrounds of 'Euphrosyne' begins with historical detail...