Goethe's Talking Books: Print Culture and the Problem of Literary Orality

Abstract

Goethe's Talking BooksPrint Culture and the Problem of Literary Orality Mary Helen Dupree 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: Nicht das—aufklärerische—Auge, sondern das Ohr wird das entscheiden de Organ der sinnlichen Wahrnehmung, und nicht auf die "körperliche" Unterstützung der Sprache z.B. durch hohe oder tiefe Stimmlage kommt es an, sondern der Ton hat ein eigenes Leben, deren Zeichenhaftigkeit gerade keinen Regeln folgt.1 Not the—Enlightened—eye, but rather the ear becomes the decisive organ of sensual perception; at stake here is not the "physical" supporting of language, for example, by pitching the voice high or low, but rather tone has its own life, whose semiotic character does not follow any rules. As Göttert and others have shown, the revaluation of the ear in the eighteenth century was by no means limited to poetological theory, but also provided the impetus for a wide spectrum of acoustic performance and composition practices, which, in turn, inspired thousands of pages of commentary in instructional handbooks, journals, and correspondences. In his 2004 monograph Ins Ohr geschrieben. Lyrik als akustische Kunst von 1750 bis 1800 (Written Into the Ear. Lyric Poetry as Acoustic Art from 1750 to 1800), Joh. Nikolaus Schneider draws on this enormous wealth of primary source material to show how the acoustic dimensions of language informed the composition and reception of German-language lyric poetry from 1750 to 1800.2 Meanwhile, the impact of popular literary reading practices around 1800 has been central to my own research as well as that of scholars such as Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus, Hans-Joachim Jakob, and Martin Danneck. For example, Meyer-Kalkus's Geschichte der literarischen Vortragskunst (History of Literary Elocution, 2020) integrates popular practices of literary declamation and recitation into a broader history of oral reading that encompasses the reading practices of Goethe, Tieck, [End Page 315] and Kleist.3 Other scholars working at the intersection of media studies and the history of science have noted that the ascendancy of the acoustic in the domain of eighteenth-century aesthetics, poetics, and performance coincided with the rise of acoustic science as a discipline.4 In her introduction to the 2015 edited volume Dichtung für die Ohren. Literatur als tonale Kunst (Poetry for the Ears: Literature as Tonal Art), Britta Herrmann reflects on the physiological and cultural implications of das innere Hören (interior or virtual hearing) around 1750 and the sense of loss that it generated, which itself had important consequences for literary culture.5 In a somewhat similar vein, Tyler Whitney has revisited Herder's Viertes Kritisches Wäldchen (Critical Forests: Fourth Grove) in order to show that Herder's depictions of the ear were not simply abstractions, but were grounded in contemporary physiological discourse.6 The current wave of scholarship on literary orality in the long eighteenth century has been bolstered by the "acoustic turn" in literary studies and an expansion of interdisciplinary research under the aegis of Sound Studies since the early 2000s.7 All of the abovementioned scholars have grappled in some way with the narrative of the ascendancy of silent reading, or Verschriftlichung, that has become entrenched in eighteenth-century German studies scholarship since the publication of Friedrich Kittler's Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (Discourse Networks 1800/1900) in the 1980s.8 This discourse continues to exert a strong pull over discussions of literary orality in the German-speaking world, even as some media-studies scholars have shifted towards less exclusionary and more holistic approaches to orality and literacy. While scholars working on literary orality in Germany have tended by and large to reinforce the dominant narrative of Verschriftlichung, they have also rightly argued for the significance of orality as a factor in processes of literary communication, thereby opening...