Goethe's Werther and the Critics (review)

Abstract

Bruce Duncan, Goethe's Werther and the Critics. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005. 208 pp. Bruce Duncan's Goethe's Werther and the Critics forms part of Camden House's excellent Literary Criticism in Perspective series, which examines an eclectic set of authors and texts in the context of their reception, and thereby aims, among other goals, to illuminate the nature of literary criticism itself. Few novels are as embroiled in the history of their own reception as is Goethe's Die Leiden desjungen Werthers, a reception which contains within it a tradition of aiming to debunk and clarify the myths and misconceptions that have sprung up precisely around the book's reception. Few studies of Werther begin without a description of the imagined hordes of imitative Sturm-und-Dranger all blowing holes in their heads while identically attired in yellow pants and blue coats, and Duncan's is no exception. The book's initial chapter, First Responses, contains an engaging and scholarly account of the well-known debates surrounding the first publication of Werther, as well as a useful summary of the development of literary criticism in Germany until 1774. Thereafter, the book abandons a chronological approach to the vast body of criticism available on Werther; instead proceeding thematically, each chapter chronologically summarizing two centuries' worth of scholarship under five broad headings. This is a mammoth task that necessarily involves many compromises on the author's part, including restricting works covered to those published in English or German, and a somewhat repetitive chapter structure.Thus, the next chapter Religious Interpretations covers approaches that deal with the moral shortcomings or virtues of the novel, its affinity to atheism, pantheism or pietism, as well as intertextual readings comparing Werther to Christ. The next, Psychological Approaches, traces the long and polemic history that sees Werther primarily as a case study in mental sickness, whether as a pathological exemplar of the Sturm und Drang generation or as a psychoanalytical patient suffering from the whole host of the twentieth century's imagined ills. Political Interpretations describes the even more heated question of Werther's supposed function as a socially critical text, and its place in the emerging bourgeois culture of Germany: it includes one of the book's most entertaining passages, an account of the furious 1970s debate between Muller's orthodox dialectical-materialist Werther interpretation and Scherpe's voguishly Marxist Werther und Wertherwirkung, all held against a background of traditional Werkimmanent interpretation that refused to see anything but an apolitical portrait of individual suffering in the novel. …