The Present Word: Culture, Society and the Site of Literature; Essays in Honour of Nicholas Boyle ed. by John Walker (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Present Word: Culture, Society and the Site of Literature; Essays in Honour of Nicholas Boyle ed. by John Walker Arnd Bohm John Walker, ed., The Present Word: Culture, Society and the Site of Literature; Essays in Honour of Nicholas Boyle. London: Legenda, for Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2013. xii + 204 pp. A festschrift honors someone or some event and also recognizes the celebrants, the members of a select community. The person being celebrated here is Nicholas Boyle, immediately familiar for his magisterial Goethe biography, of which two volumes have appeared so far. He is less well known for his concerns about the current state of the world of learning—and of the world—as signaled by his Who Are We Now? Christian Humanism and the Global Market from Hegel to Heaney (1998) and by his 2014: How to Survive the Next World Crisis (2010). The wide range of Boyle’s interests does not exceed the capable reach of the fifteen contributors to this volume, although the whole does demand sturdy readers, ranging as it does across German literature from the Baroque to Thomas Mann but also including Shakespeare, Les Murray, and Seamus Heaney. More than half of the contributions deal directly or tangentially with Goethe. John A. McCarthy’s “Cognitive Mapping: Adam, Venus, and Faust” is a complex discussion that brings together the most recent neuroscience with paintings by Michelangelo and Giorgione to shed light on Faust. The short essay by T. J. Reed, “Goethe as Secular Icon,” is part of a long-standing disagreement with Boyle’s interpretation of Goethe the poet. It is a supplement to the critical review of the biography Reed published in 2001; he proposes that Goethe’s stance was marked by “delighted assent” (47) and not just by absences. Charlotte Lee’s contribution is “Mignon and the Idea of the Secret.” Regina Sachers shows unexpected parallels between Goethe’s “Urworte. Orphisch” and Mörike’s “Besuch in Urach.” Ritchie Robertson touches on, among other things, Egmont and Die natürliche Tochter in assessing Goethe and Machiavelli. Martin Swales compares Iphigenie auf Tauris and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in “The Human Epiphany.” Christoph Jamme in “Enlightened Mythology: Thomas Mann and Myth” and John Walker in “Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and the Site of Literature” deal with a question that remains alive for modern literature: namely, what the role of myth can or should be. Walker connects this with Boyle’s concern for “the theological and cultural meaning of the secularization of the Christian tradition” (109). The triangulation of the relationship between theology, literature, and mythology continues to be a pressing issue. What is the connection between [End Page 318] faith and knowledge? That the question is not of recent origin is shown by Helen Watanabe O’Kelly in her all-too-brief “Ways of Knowing: Blaise Pascal, Angelus Silesius and Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg.” The inclusion of two poets who might be unfamiliar to Germanisten can only be a benefit. Ian Cooper focuses on one poem by Les Murray, Australia’s great poet. He elucidates him via Roland Barthes and Caravaggio, placing him at the center of European tradition. Seamus Heaney is revealed to have been anything but a marginal Irish writer in Eamon Duffy’s “Seamus Heaney and Catholicism.” Duffy reads Heaney’s career and works, tracing the move from minority status in Northern Ireland to the struggle to reconcile the tensions between poetry and faith in troubled times. Boyle’s convictions as a citizen of his country as well as of the republic of letters are foremost in H. B. Nisbet’s “‘Just One Damned Thing after Another?’ Some Reflections on the Philosophy of History,” in Mark Ogden’s “Christian Humanism and Higher Education,” and in Paul Connerton’s “Seven Types of Forgetting.” Nisbet’s reflections on the rise of history are thoughtful, as always. Mark Ogden grapples with the thorny issue of whether universities today can resist commercialization and can sustain ethics. It remains for Connerton to draw attention to the importance of forgetting in our modern consciousness as he surveys types of nonremembering. His few telling paragraphs on how the Germans managed...