Introduction: The Poetics of Space in the Goethezeit

Abstract

THE FIELD OF GERMAN STUDIES in twenty-first century has been shaped in no small measure by spatial or topographical turn in sciences and humanities. Two important scholarly anthologies edited on either side of Atlantic indicate breadth of this critical idiom: Topographien der Literatur: Deutsche Literatur im transnationalen Kontext, edited by Hartmut Bohme; and Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German and Visual Culture, edited by Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel.1 Fittingly, in organizing these collections, respective editors have chosen to apply models associated with critical turn in question. Thus, four sections of Bohme's anthology are headed Representations of Discursive Spaces, Spaces of Literature, Literary Spaces, and Borders and Foreign, while four sections of Fisher and Mennel's collection bear headings Mapping Spaces, Spaces of Urban, Spaces of Encounter, and Visualized Space. In their overall organization, these two milestone anthologies thus studiously avoid what Bohme terms classical systems of order, for instance according to periods (IX). In this special section of Goethe Yearbook devoted to poetics of space in Goethezeit, we hope to build on work of these ground-breaking anthologies, while questioning an approach that foregrounds category of space at expense of that of period-whether understood in more traditional sense of Age of Goethe, or Reinhart Koselleck's notion of Sattelzeit, or temporal marker 1800.Within framework of spatial turn, relegation of period to secondary role (Bohme IX) is understandable. Indeed, turn to an analysis of space as a fundamental category arose precisely as a reaction to, and critique of, historicism, in particular Marxian historical dialectic. As Edward Soja writes in Postmodern Geographies: Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, The critical hermeneutic is still enveloped in a temporal master-narrative, in a historical but not yet comparably geographical imagination.2 Building on twentieth-century thinkers (particularly Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre), Soja and other contemporary theoretical geographers (such as Derek Gregory and David Harvey) have challenged the hoary traditions of a space-blinkered historicism and have helped effect far-reaching spatialization of critical imagination (Soja 11).To be sure, Soja's project aims not for displacement of historical by spatial, but rather a that is, formulation of a theory of social being actively emplaced in space and time in an explicitly historical and geographical contextualization (11). In so doing, Soja follows trajectory of Foucault's line of thought as sketched out in his essay Of Other Spaces. Foucault begins by contrasting nineteenth century, with its obsession with history, and present as the epoch of space. But in very next paragraph, he blurs this dichotomy when he contends that the space which today appears to form horizon of our concerns, our theory, our systems is not an innovation; space itself has a history in Western experience and it is not possible to disregard fatal intersection of time with space.3 Foucault never fully resolves this tension in his thought-one moment drawing a sharp distinction between epochs according to their privileging of time or of space; next, collapsing this distinction and bringing into view manner in which space and time are always imbricated.We have assembled following six essays in spirit of Foucault's intersectional thought and Soja's project of rebalancing, with aim of contributing to literary history of a range of personal, social, political, and aesthetic spaces. In so doing, we hope to bring into sharper focus multiple transformations of spatial practices, imaginings, and theories that occurred in German-speaking Europe around 1800. …