Who Is This Schiller Now? Essays on His Reception and Significance ed. by Jeffrey L. High, Nicholas Martin, Norbert Oellers (review)

Abstract

Jeffrey L. High, Nicholas Martin, and Norbert Oellers, eds., Who Is This Now? Essays on His Reception and Significance. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011.xviii + 494 pp.Drawn from the international conference of the same name, held at California State University, Long Beach, in September 2009, Who Is This Now? offers twenty-eight essays reexamining Schiller's work in categories ranging from drama and poetry, aesthetics and philosophy, and history and politics, to reception and, finally,Schiller Now.Full section titles (for example Schiller, Drama, and Poetry or Schiller Reception-Reception and Schiller) suggest that this collection aims to relieve studies of the generic and theoretical pressures to which they have been subjected, and to consider his legacy anew. Thus the title of the collection, prompted by Coleridge's excited letter of November 3,1794 to Robert Southey, upon reading Rauber, emerges as founding principle for the entire project: to consider what Schuler's work and thought mean in and for our present. Accordingly, as the editors point out in the foreword, contributions take to task common or previously reigning assumptions about the idealist, the Kantian, the classicist-the collection intends to break down barriers of classification and periodization, and reposition as forerunner of modernism, his work as world literature (xi-xu).Several contributions seek to revise our literary and phuosophical readings of Schuler. Four of the five essays in part 1 (Schuler, Drama, and Poetry) grapple with perceived misreadings or unrecognized influences (Hans H. Hiebel on Lenz's influence, for example, or Matthew Bell on melancholy in Schuler's drama). Essays in part 2 (Schuler, Aesthetics, and Phuosophy), part 3 (Schuler, History, and Politics), and beyond not only weigh in on the development and meaning of Schuler's phuosophical and aesthetic thought, but also examine the valence of religiosity in his drama and history (contributions by Elisabeth Krimmer and Wolfgang Riedel), and take up decidedly more sensitive questions of Schuler's political thought (Maria del Rosario Acosta Lopez on aesthetics and politics, Yvonne Nuges on democracy, and Henrik Sponsel on post-1945 criticism of Schuler).These contributions remind the reader that, even at basic textual level, Schuler's work still reveals secrets. The import of such revelations, on the other hand, is of rather mixed quality. The authors in part 1, for example, seem more content to reinterpret, whue paying decidedly less attention to the need for reinterpretation. Jennifer Driscoll Colosimo's essay and the Gothic is rare attempt to correct the record of literary history in its demonstration that played more influential role in the development of an international gothic genre than Germanistik has traditionally admitted. Likewise, Laura Anna Macor's Die Moralphuosophie des jungen Schuler is well-organized and readable refutation of the flight to Kant thesis, tracing the development of moral-phuosophical bent in that predates his reading of Kant.The pinnacle of this revisionist strand of argument is occupied by the very direct contributions of Peter Pabisch andT. J. Reed. Pabisch's passionate rhetoric on behalf of the German classics is stirring-unfortunately, he allows the stated subject of his contribution, Schuler's ballads, to be upstaged by routine arguments in favor of the salutary effects of literary study. Reed, on the other hand, makes admirably short shrift of Schuler's historian-critics by asserting that Schuler's perceived naive belief in progress and his recourse to Enlightenment humanism constitute progressive realism, a way of living in and with history. …