David Wellbery Research Articles

The late Goethe: New directions

The late Goethe: New directions

Poetologie der Stimmung. Ein ästhetisches Phänomen der frühen Goethezeit by Stefan Hajduk

Reviewed by: Poetologie der Stimmung. Ein ästhetisches Phänomen der frühen Goethezeit by Stefan Hajduk Daniel Purdy Stefan Hajduk, Poetologie der Stimmung. Ein ästhetisches Phänomen der frühen Goethezeit. Bielefeld: transcript, 2016. 513 pp. The notion of Stimmung is in the air, it is all around us. After having been pushed aside in the late twentieth century, Stimmung has returned as a priority for architecture, city planning, environmentalism, and literary criticism. The term has become the progressive angle from which diverse movements have sought to reverse the functionality of modernism without falling into retrograde traditionalism. The eighteenth-century affinity for nurturing Stimmung, first articulated in landscape gardening and sentimental prose, has been mobilized into a more active climate awareness, both local and global. Stefan Hajduk's massive Poetologie der Stimmung covers much more than the literature of the early Goethezeit, as it addresses the 250-year history of scholars who have sought to characterize the illusive quality. He engages earnestly with Leo Spitzer's articles on Stimmung's relation to ancient ideas of cosmological harmony while proposing Heidegger's Befindlichkeit as conceptually superior to nineteenth-century aesthetic articulations. He is also fully conversant with Gernot Böhme's more recent appeal to foster Atmosphäre in architecture. Most importantly for Goethe scholars, Hajduk builds his argument on David Wellbery's definitive essay on the subject in Aesthetische Grundbegriffe, providing interpretations and examples that augment Wellbery's reconstruction of the term's semantic field. For all his thoroughness, Wellbery's succinct review of Goethe's remarks on Stimmung leaves room for many more investigations into the term's poetic use around Strasbourg and Weimar. Hajduk's book takes up the challenge by finding diverse forms of Stimmung in the early Goethezeit, not just those that proffer a lyrical perception of nature. The core of Hajduk's book is organized around lengthy close interpretations of three texts: Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Karl Philipp Moritz's Andreas Hartknopf novels, and Ludwig Tieck's short drama, "Der Abschied." [End Page 362] Hajduk agrees with Wellbery's opening claim that the difficulty in translating Stimmung into other European languages reflects the manner in which the German term integrates both subjective and objective references. Stimmung appears both within the perceiving individual as well as in the surrounding environment. "Mood" and "atmosphere" capture different portions but by no means the full range of aesthetic connotations in Stimmung. Because the term is often invoked in such a manner as to take advantage of its rich metaphorical allusions, no single other word comes close to its fullness. Agreeing with Wellbery's Begriffsgeschichte, Hajduk reviews the many connotations of Stimmung, landing at the conclusion that "mood," "milieu," "ambience," "atmosphere," or "attunement" do not adequately correspond to the word's musical-cosmological resonance nor its indeterminate sense of an emotional landscape. Demonstrating the inadequacy of many translation choices makes clear how many diverse and complex connotations are carried by the word. Indirectly, both Wellbery and Hajduk underscore the distinctiveness of the German word. For both scholars, contextual usage remains vital to understanding the particular meanings invoked at any given instance. Wellbery refrains from offering a conceptual definition but turns instead to a history of its metaphorical application. In this regard, both critics agree with Spitzer that Stimmung's lexical career takes off in the eighteenth century. In building off his predecessors, Hajduk points out that Wellbery's focus on aesthetic theory serves an entirely different purpose than Spitzer's reconstruction of cosmology. Hajduk goes further than Spitzer and Wellbery in highlighting the inadequacy of all translations and conceptualizations of Stimmung to argue that philosophical definitions around 1800 were ultimately incomplete and poetic articulations increasingly subjective, thereby losing the term's spatial and natural dimensions. For Wellbery, the indeterminacy is a source of fruitful variation, whereas Hajduk sees a problem that ultimately requires Heidegger to provide an adequate answer. Contrary to Wellbery's conceptual history, Hajduk argues that from Kant to Humboldt, Stimmung loses its position within the aesthetic space of nature as something external to the subject, such as a musical tone or atmosphere—decisive connotations for Goethe, Moritz, and Tieck. The poetic texts Hajduk cites...

Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon: Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the ‘Limits’ of Painting and Poetry ed. by Avi Lifschitz, Michael Squire

Reviewed by: Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon: Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the ‘Limits’ of Painting and Poetry ed. by Avi Lifschitz, Michael Squire C. Richard Booher Avi Lifschitz and Michael Squire (eds.). Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon: Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the ‘Limits’ of Painting and Poetry. Classical Presences. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xxxiii, 411. $110.00. ISBN 978-0-19-880222-8. Lifschitz and Squire have assembled a set of essays on Lessing’s Laocoon, in honor of the 250th anniversary of its publication. The contributors come from a broad range of disciplines including archaeology, art history, classics, literature, and philosophy. This volume serves as a useful resource for those interested in Lessing’s work and its contributions to aesthetics. This volume’s strengths are many. For anyone approaching Laocoon for the first time, it offers an excellent entryway into the central issues in Lessing’s text and the debates that have arisen between scholars over the past 250 years. The book’s organization makes it easy to read selectively, according to the interests of the reader. Yet this strength is also one of the book’s weaknesses. It is better read piecemeal than as a whole. When it is read as a whole, there tends to be an excess of repetition. Lessing’s text is framed and placed in context over and over again. This can be tiresome when encountered in nearly every chapter. Lessing’s Laocoon is itself a strange work, whose peculiarities are often overlooked due to its status as a canonical work of aesthetics. Lessing himself describes it as “more of a disordered collectanea for a book, than a book.” The work’s title is derived from Lessing’s discussion of the difference between the [End Page 240] representation of the Laocoon myth in the famous sculpture held in the Vatican and in Virgil’s Aeneid. Lessing’s central question concerns what each of these forms of representation can do most effectively. What can sculpture, or the visual arts more generally, do that cannot be done as effectively in poetry, or the literary arts? That is, as the subtitle of Lessing’s book asks, what are the proper Grenzen (limits or borders) of poetry and sculpture? One lesson that runs through many of the essays (such as those of Luca Giuliani and David Wellbery) is that Lessing’s account of the boundaries of the arts can only be made compelling if we generalize from sculpture and poetry to a broader set of categories. Some contributors (Frederick Beiser, Avi Lifschitz, and W. J. T. Mitchell) keep their focus on the fine arts, and work out accounts of the accuracy and usefulness of Lessing’s conception of the difference between the visual and literary arts. Jürgen Trabant goes even further, using Lessing as an occasion to reflect on the difference between linguistic and imagistic cognition as such. For those interested in these issues, the volume offers much of value. There are a few issues that could have been more fully addressed in the volume. The first is the adequacy of Lessing’s own theory for forms of art that combine the literary and the visual that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as film and Wagner’s conception of Gesamtkunstwerk. The second is an oddity of Lessing’s own work: he never actually beheld the sculpture that is given pride of place in his essay. This matter is mentioned a few times, but its potential significance is not explored in much detail. The arc of Lessing’s argument, as several contributors note, tends to defend the superiority of the literary over the visual arts. One wonders if his lack of interest in seeing the Laocoon statue evidences a merely personal proclivity for language over and against the visual arts, rather than his ranking of them being the product of careful reflection on each medium. One final concern is this volume’s inclusion in Oxford University Press’ Classical Presences series. The justification for it seems to be that Lessing’s text discusses the Laocoon statue, as well as works of Greek and Latin literature. However, Lessing’s work seems to be at its weakest when read...

Goethe’s Visual World by Pamela Currie (review)

Pamela Cvirrie, Visual World. Germanic Literatures 3- London: Legenda, 2013. 166 pp.Pamela Currie presents a thoroughgoing analysis of theory and perspective of in works of art. The book's eight chapters flesh out his collaboration with the artist and art historian Heinrich Meyer whom he met in Rome during his first trip to Italy. Although Goethe already had developed a rudimentary understanding of color, it was from this point on that he developed his mature perspective and even to some extent obsessed over color.The first and third chapters establish the psychology of visual perspective. The first chapter deals with images. Drawing on David Wellbery's readings, Currie demonstrates that early works such as Werther reveal his obsession with imagery. She also uses Jacques Lacan's psychological hypothesis of the individual's fixation on the mental image of the counterpart of the mirror stage (7) to explain thinking. Currie's point via both theorists is that use of mirror images explains his penchant for portraying the subjective beholder as being in love with someone who reflects himself. Such a condition clarifies the relationship between Werther and Lotte or even between the youth and his paramour in early lyrics such as Willkommen und Abschied (32).Currie further explores Wellbery's idea that this mirroring relationship results in a specular moment, which supposedly functions as an organizing concept (32). For Wellbery this involves the psychosexual mother-son relationship. Although Currie cannot wholeheartedly underwrite Wellbery's argument, she does agree with both Wellbery and Lacan that Goethe purposely portrays individuals who often possess narcissistic inclinations that depend on mirroring.Currie's second chapter,'Ambiguous Figures in Wilhelm Meisters expands upon this idea. Here Currie conceives of the Lehrjahre as a novel that identifies childhood with self-absorption, and ... narrates a narcissist's quest for a partner who is not a mere self-image (22). For Currie, this explains Wilhelm's attraction to women who possess a (slightly) masculine side that mirrors himself. These figures include Chlorinde, Natalie, and even the hermaphroditic Mignon (23). We might easily add other Goethean female figures with similarly masculine traits to this list, such as Gotz's wife Elisabeth, Adelheid von Waldorf, and Egmont's Klarchen, not to mention gender-ambiguous lads in Faust //, Knabe Lenker, and Euphorion.The fourth chapter, Goethe's Green: The 'Mixed' Boundary Colours in Zur Farbenlehre, provides the theoretical underpinning for the remaining chapters in the book. Currie chronicles argument against Newton's theory and his obsession with the boundary green when seen through a prism. This green actually turns out to be only a spectral color that results from a range of wavelengths and is not akin to mixed pigments (such as when blue and yellow are mixed in painting to make green). The upshot of Currie's dense technical discourse is that Pieter Johannes Bouma,in reexamining argument, substantiates the fact that, Newton to the contrary,Goethe was therefore quite correct in thinking that boundary colors could form the basic building blocks for all mixing (56). …

Goethe's ghosts: reading and the persistence of literature

Invoking name has become fashionable again. With new methods and technologies of reading threatening to render literature virtual and insubstantial, we have the sense that Goethe's - the otherwise neglected voices and traditions that, finding their most trenchant expression in Goethe, inform the Western storehouse of literature - can show us long-forgotten dimensions of literature. Inspired by the distinguished Goethe scholar Jane Brown, whose life's work has called attention to the allegorical modes haunting the mimetic forms that dominate modern literature, the contributors to this volume take a rich variety of approaches to Goethe: cultural studies, history of the book, semiotics, deconstruction, colonial studies, feminism, childhood studies, and eco-criticism. The persistence, omnipresence, and modalities of the ghosts they find suggest that more than influence or standards is at issue here. work informs current debates on nineteenth-century nationalism, while his Faust increasingly serves to express contemporary culture's anxiety about new technologies. The stubborn reappearance of these revenants testifies to more fundamental issues concerning the status of literature and the task of the reader. As the contributors demonstrate, these questions acquire renewed urgency in writers as diverse as Hegel, Adorno, Benn, Droste-Hulshoff, and Nietzsche. Each of the essays testifies to the enduring salience and presence of Goethe. Contributors: Helmut Ammerlahn, Benjamin Bennett, Richard Block, Dieter Borchmeyer, Franz-Josef Deiters, Richard T. Gray, Martha B. Helfer, Meredith Lee, Clark Muenzer, Andrew Piper, Simon Richter, Jurgen Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Patricia Simpson, Robert Tobin, David Wellbery, Sabine Wilke. Simon Richter is Professor of German Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Richard Block is Associate Professor of German at the University of Washington.

Improvisation as Art: Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives by Edgar Landgraf (review)

Reviewed by: Improvisation as Art: Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives by Edgar Landgraf Gabriel Trop Improvisation as Art: Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives. By Edgar Landgraf. New York: Continuum, 2011. Pp. 176. Cloth $100.00. ISBN 978-1441146946. Edgar Landgraf’s Improvisation as Art is by all counts a theoretically nuanced and historically grounded book, remarkable not only for its level of lucidity and insight into eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century aesthetics and literature, but for its commitment to thinking through the paradoxes and complexities of aesthetic practices that are still flourishing in the twenty-first century. The book aims at more than a mere analysis of the intersection of art and improvisation. Rather, it takes up an important strand in a genealogy of modernity, describing how the new, the unexpected, and the inventive emerged as recognizable practices and values constitutive of the very concept of the modern. The book’s most important contributions are both theoretical and historical in nature, and its merits should be assessed with regard to these dual trajectories. From a theoretical perspective, Improvisation as Art may be regarded as one of the most clear and compelling scholarly attempts to deploy Luhmann’s systems-theoretical [End Page 425] framework to revise our understanding of aesthetics and retell the history of modernity, and is therefore comparable to recent interventions made along these lines by David Wellbery and Cary Wolfe. To those unfamiliar with this theoretical approach, it may seem almost provocative to rethink a phenomenon as seemingly fluid as improvisation through the lens of systems. And yet, this would be to misunderstand the very concept of the system in Luhmann’s theory: a system is perpetually organizing itself in response to an environment exterior to it in a way that is decisive for its internal structure, finding pathways of connectivity in situations saturated with contingency, unpredictability, and complexity. One of Landgraf’s central contentions consists in the argument that systems theory can account for improvisation in a way that is sensitive to the richness of the phenomenon while at the same time avoiding some of the pitfalls of other theoretical perspectives, above all Derridean deconstruction. Derrida argues that improvisation—as an activity that, in an absolute sense, entails the emergence of something wholly new or unexpected—is impossible precisely because its intelligibility depends upon preexistent practices against which something stands out as improvisational. For example, a jazz performer in a concert does not in fact bring something absolutely new into the world; such acts are interpreted in the light of previous similar instances and must be evaluated against a series of comparable events in order to have meaning. According to Derrida, improvisation therefore presupposes, and even reinforces—even if only through transgressing—the rule that it seeks to suspend. Landgraf criticizes Derrida’s essentialization of planning, calculation, and structure as diametrically opposed to innovation. Indeed, precisely those elements that make improvisation impossible for Derrida are seen to enable it from a systems-theoretical perspective: stability, repetition, and variation constitute the conditions of possibility of improvised acts rather than their conditions of impossibility. This insight allows Landgraf to show how constraint (e.g., the “formulas” governing jazz music), techniques of staging and framing (the “venue” of the concert), and social and cultural expectations in processes of recognition (the “audience” for whom this situation is more or less intelligible) form an irreducible part of aesthetic practices claiming to be improvisational. Much of the book is dedicated to a historical account of how improvisation functions not merely as a model for the emergence of novelty amidst constraints, but as a way in which artistic practices, beginning in the late eighteenth century, framed their practices as artistic practices in relation to improvisation. The historical narrative unfolds roughly along the following lines. The Enlightenment, with its emphasis on didacticism and moral improvement, was, in general, suspicious of improvisation. The emergence of the notion of aesthetic autonomy in the late eighteenth century—or the way in which art distinguishes itself [End Page 426] as art by referring to its own modes of production and reception rather than, for example, relying on civil society, church, or state as sources of normativity—then coincides with a...

Introduction: New Approaches to Goethe’s Lyric Poetry

Introduction: New Approaches to Goethe’s Lyric Poetry Horst Lange and Christian P. Weber This collection of articles emerged from a series of panels devoted to Goethe’s lyric poetry at the Thirty-first Conference of the German Studies Association in 2010. The organizers, including Regina Sachers, were motivated by the observation that this genre of Goethe’s writings has been surprisingly understudied in recent years. On the one hand, scholars have tended to revisit very similar questions raised by a comparatively small number of individual poems; only rarely have new contexts or innovative theoretical approaches been brought into play. On the other hand, David Wellbery’s magisterial study The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (1996) has been received with such appreciation that scholars seem to have been discouraged from pursuing new directions in this area of research. Our aim was to bring together a wide variety of established and emerging Goethe scholars and take stock of the current innovative approaches to Goethe’s lyric poetry. We are hopeful that the following articles, which (with one exception) have their origin in this panel series, will open up new avenues of research and poetic insight as they examine Goethe’s lyric through various discursive lenses and from different theoretical angles. The first three contributions propose new ways of reading Goethe’s early poems that go beyond David Wellbery’s methodology and assessments. Edgar Landgraf, meeting David Wellbery on his home turf, makes a strong argument that the discursive formation of Goethe’s early poems is better understood if approached with a rigorous application of Luhmann’s systems theory. Christian Weber delineates metapoetic strategies in Goethe’s early poetry and argues that the arrangement of the “great hymns of genius” in the Erste Weimarer Gedichtsammlung constitutes a dimension of poetic meaning that cannot be captured by the common approach of reading poems as singular events. Joseph O’Neil’s reading of Erklärung eines alten Holzschnittes vorstellend Hans Sachsens poetische Sendung reviews David Wellbery’s notion of “specular romanticism.” As O’Neil argues, in this poem of his first Weimar years Goethe proclaims an alternative version of “poetic vocation” based on distinction, mediation, and judgment instead of the imagined identity between the self and the cosmos that had been suggested as characteristic of his earlier poems. Other articles gain new ground by activating new contexts. Reading Mignon’s “Kennst du das Land” both in its setting in Wilhelm Meisters [End Page 3] Lehrjahre and in the context of a theory of empathy, Fritz Breithaupt asks how this poem, despite thematizing a highly individual fate, can command universal appeal. Frauke Berndt and Claudia Maienborn draw on insights from linguistics, psychoanalysis, and rhetoric to argue that the “standard” reading of Auf dem See, which construes the “reifende Frucht” as a symbol of the maturing subject, is highly questionable; their proposed reading of the poem casts it as a “media event.” Daniel Wilson submits that the questions raised by Selige Sehnsucht are best answered by placing it in a series of Divan poems that talk about homosexuality. Benjamin Bennett argues that—in light of the “antipoetic” agenda of Faust—poetry can only relate to truth by enacting it; he carefully reads two poems (Dauer im Wechsel and Vermächtniß) to make visible the features of such an enactment. Via Goethe’s theory of science and American transcendentalism, Hannah Eldridge connects her analysis of the difficulties of comprehending the Divan poem Unbegrenzt to Stanley Cavell’s response to the problems of skepticism. And, intriguingly, starting with Unbegrenzt as well, Charlotte Lee finds that the Divan and Hegel’s speculative philosophy resonate with surprising similarities. [End Page 4] Horst Lange University of Central Arkansas Christian P. Weber Florida State University Copyright © 2013 Goethe Society of North America

Beyond the Poem: Strategies of Metapoetic Reflection in Goethe’s Erster Weimarer Gedichtsammlung

WHILE THE FRANKFURT EDITION SUGGESTS that Goethe's poems ought to be read in the contexts of carefully crafted ensembles and cycles, it remains common practice to analyze them in distinct isolation.1 Even in a study as monumental and sophisticated as David Wellbery's The Specular Moment, poems such as Ganymed and Prometheus, which regularly placed side by side, are subjected to extensive exegesis without any reflection of their spatial conjunction.2 Yet Goethe's lyric poetry consists of dynamic poetic processes that surpass the lyric capacity of individual poems. By focusing on the so-called great hymns of the Geniezeit, which are commonly regarded as paradigms of the aesthetic autonomy of the individual artwork, this article aims to show how these poems in fact contribute to the realization of a certain poetic idea that transgresses the limits of lyrical expression in single texts. To bring this overall poetic idea to light, employs the strategy of juxtaposing related poems in the arrangements of certain ensembles, thereby fashioning specific contexts of transmission. I call this strategy metapoetic for two reasons: first, because it reveals how the dynamic of the poetic process reaches beyond individual poems; and second, because the hermeneutic reflection of the intertextual relations among the poems of ensemble generates insight into the poetologic of the production process as such.Readings that attempt to carve out in detail the implications of Goethe's poetic arrangements focus exclusively on prominent pairings such as the one above, on groupings and rubrics that have been named by the author (for example Elegien I, later renamed Romische Elegien, and Elegien II in the Neue Schriften of 1800), or on rubrics that were arranged especially for the Ausgabe letzter Hand, such as Trilogie der Leidenschaften and Gott und Welt. Especially in later years, Goethe's poetic production appears to be guided, even pre-informed, by generic forms and integral themes, as in the cycles of Sonette and the West-ostliche Divan} In contrast, the poetic production of young Goethe is widely considered the epitome of spontaneously inspired Erlebnislyrik, and consequently his early poems are commonly regarded as momentous and autonomous poetic entities.However, it is worth noting that, as early as 1767, compiled and ordered his poems in the book Annette. Two years later, in a letter to Langer, he describes the grouping of Neue Lieder as die Geschichte meines Herzens in kleinen Gemalden!4 Moreover, was highly selective about the type of poems he submitted to specific journals.5 For example, he published most of the love poetry inspired by his Friederikeand Lili-episodes in Friedrich Jacobi's Iris, Zeitschrift fur Frauenzimmer in 1775. Many of his avant-gardist Sturm and Drang poems, however, remained unpublished during his youth, although had compiled them in the so-called Erste Weimarer Gedichtsammlung (EWG) from 1777 or 1778.6 This collection is only transmitted in Goethe's handwriting and consists of twenty-eight poems that are carefully arranged in a binder.7 As Karl Eibl remarks, the first eleven poems, which include most of the so-called hymns of genius such as Mahomets Gesang, Wandrers Sturmlied, Prometheus, and Ganymed, form an ensemble of diverse speech-roles that virtually formulates a poetic program.8 Owing to the individual prominence of these poems and the particularly elaborate relations they entertain with one another, I have selected this group for a case study that explores the strategies and poetic significance of what I call Goethe's metapoetics. Based on this evidence, my argument aims to show that the planning of arrangements has informed the production process of Goethe's lyric poetry at all times.The Making of Prometheus: Intrapoetic Conflicts and Their Metapoetic ResolutionBefore turning to the specifics of Goethe's poetics of arrangement, it is necessary to describe what constitutes and drives his poetic process, if only to highlight to which larger movement metapoetical strategies belong to as well as to clarify the poetic terminology and to justify the unorthodox hermeneutic method employed by this article. …

Meistersänger als Beruf : The Maieutics of Poetic Vocation in “Erklärung eines alten Holzschnittes . . .”

There are at least two stories to be told about Goethe's poetry According to one, power of artist (and we all know is consummate artist) grows from passions and drives that are crystallized in and expressed in art. This hermeneutics of experience produces myth of unmediated expressivity1 that is central to biographical story about (or, more recently, about Goethe.O,2 a story that nonetheless persists in different forms, on different premises, in various considerations of Goethe as a coherent unit, author with a project who produces a certain discourse.In second story about this author-person's poetry, a story told by David Wellbery in his pathbreaking study The Specular Moment, presents a recodification of intimacy (Wellbery adapts Niklas Luhmann's language of encoding and recoding here) in form of the lyric. More than poetry in usual sense,the lyric is a new discourse, and its reader is held to operate differently from reader of previous poetic discourse by an effort of projection onto speaking subject that amounts to grasp[ing], through of divination, the. subjectivity that alone gives text its coherence.3 From Erlebnis criticism to a partially Luhmann-inspired discourse analysis, from idyll to as a particular formation beginning in 1770-71, this story posits and performs decisive breaks with tradition in claiming for and itself a modernity that begins in now of subjectivity and critical subjectivity that would project former onto or into latter.In what follows, I want to tell yet a third story. My story, however brief, focuses on step in lyric-critical from empathetic projection to act of divination and challenges identity of those operations as well as Romantic paradigm that implicitly underwrites this identity. In his early Weimar period, so well after beginning of period in 1770-71,1 want to suggest, is dealing with or dealing in multiple versions of subject at same time, commonalities among which, however, constitute a specific poetic structure that challenges of divinatory criticism.In both Wellbery's story and mine, subject is not just a poetic figure but also a poietic figure, not just a first-person seer or speaker in poem but also a maker, one who engages in poiesis. While central poems in his model of Lyrik, such as Willkommen und Abschied, emphasize autonomization of poetic subject in itself, without regard to end in sense of Zweck or telos, Wellbery concludes his study with notion of poetic vocation, implying that creation follows autonomization. This link is most evident in Prometheus, in which Ich now makes people:Hier sitz ich, forme MenschenNach meinem Bilde,Ein Geschlecht das mir gleich sei,Zu leiden, weinen,Geniesen und zu freuen sichUnd dein nicht zu achtenWie ich! (FA 1:204)4The moments of autonomy, creativity, and identity are joined in Promethean self-reproduction, a neat encapsulation both of tendencies of what would become Romantic poetics and of a certain account of selfhood presented in theological terms. While former stress role of mirror, latter constitutes a set of arguments about subjectivity evidently thematized in Goethe's poem, with its interchange of ich and mein with du and dein, and highly formalized in Wellbery's study, which puts a fine Romantic point on Promethean logic of poiesis. This model evokes three essential acts: seeing, being called, and receiving. These steps form subject, who is also poet, in terms of a specifically modern, autonomous subject. While a more skeptical reading might see this as of influence on part of toward his poetic forebears, anxiety that fabricates autonomous subject simply for sake of poetic one-upmanship, Goethe's Promethean moment in fact calls such a subject performatively into poetic being in three steps. …

Intimacy, Morality, and the Inner Problematic of the Lyric

Goethe's post-anacreontic poetry fundamentally alter[ed] nature of poetic writing, inaugurating a type of literary discourse that, from a European perspective, can be called Romantic Thus argues David Wellbery Idyllic and Lyric Intimacy, introductory essay of The Specular Moment: Goethe's Early Lyric and Beginnings of Romanticism} Wellbery does not read Romantic poetological tradition it generated, a tradition that is in essence tautological, drawing on, and reinforcing, mythical values-'nature,' 'force,' 'youth,' 'unmediated song'-the texts themselves set into circulation (7); rather he approaches Goethe's early poetry as a particular practice that produces effects of which it speaks. A comparison of Goethe's Maifest with passages from Salomon Gesner's sentimental idylls reveals discursive mutations, changes pragmatic, fictional, temporal, and semantic structures that generate enunciative modalities and strategies of reading (11) associated with Romantic lyric. While comparison with Gesner focuses on particular changes literary writing, epochal significance Wellbery attributes to Goethe's poetry from 1770s is not restricted to literary history; rather, Wellbery draws on Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Kittler, and Niklas Luhmann to recognize broad social relevance of Goethe's writing technique. It is said to have changed the field of intimate and to have helped reorganize intimacy itself (see 10-11). Furthermore, structure of that crystallize[s] into signature of a historical emergence (3) around Goethe's poetry is not restricted to Romantic period. As argument progresses past comparison with Gesner and turns increasingly abstract, Wellbery develops nuce a theory of modern lyric. In respect to what essay identifies as the inner problematic of lyric (22), Wellbery puts Goethe proximity to poetic concerns of one of most progressive voices of twentieth century, Paul Celan.2That Goethe's post-anacreontic poetry alters field of intimate communications (presumably for Western society at large) and that it already carries seed for modern are two far-reaching assertions that should enthuse any Goethe scholar and make him or her forget that by same token Wellbery reduces their genius to that of a gifted craftsman, mere addressee of changes that created effects that hitherto had erroneously been taken for expressions of a higher soul. In following, I want to revisit both observations, not to remystify Goethe, but to expand on sociohistorical context from which Romantic emerges. That is, I want to read poetic changes that coalesce Goethe's poetry and produce a new practice (and correspondingly a new hermeneutics) context of larger reorganization of field of intimate communication eighteenth century by picking up on a reference to Niklas Luhmann's work that Wellbery's essay makes merely passing. It suggests that we understand as a cultural technique3 that helps redefine how intimacy is communicated. It presupposes that changes field of communication-rather than new poetic, psychological, or philosophical insights of exceptional souls-offer new possibilities for lovers to constitute and experience themselves and through their intimate involvements, be they poetic or personal. A more extensive look at sociohistorical context of this development reveals-this is my thesis-that differentiation of this discourse eighteenth century is modulated by particular moral codes. These moral codes, which guide expectations of authenticity, immediacy, naturalness, originality, and singularity, produce paradoxes communication that Romantic adopts for itself and that turn come to structure modern notions of subjectivity. …

GÓRGIAS E A RETORICIDADE: ONIPRESENÇA E ONIPOTÊNCIA DA CAPACIDADE RETÓRICA

Este artigo apresenta algumas considerações gorgianas sobre a retórica a fim de contrabalançar a visão da retórica clássica exposta por John Bender e David Wellbery, no interior de suas cinco teses históricas sobre o ressurgimento contemporâneo dessa arte e seu enfraquecimento na Modernidade. Depois de breve introdução ao tema (I), explico as teses de tais autores, seu conceito de retoricidade e sua concepção da retórica clássica (II). Analiso então aspectos da retórica grega (III) e três teses de Górgias que contrabalançam a concepção dos autores: a) a indeterminação genérica da retórica, b) a instanciação do discurso sobre a verdade/conhecimento e c) a sua aplicação a contextos não-técnicos e desinstitucionalizados (IV). Minha conclusão é de que Górgias está muito mais próximo de uma situação de “retoricidade” do que julgam tais autores.

Language in migration: multilingualism and exophonic writing in the new poetics

The limit: music needs no translation. Lyric poetry: closest to music and posing the greatest difficulties for translation. –Walter Benjamin, ‘Translation For and Against’1 With the Warsaw Express,...

Kafkas Urteil und die Literaturtheorie: Zehn Modellanalysen (review)

Reviewed by: Kafkas Urteil und die Literaturtheorie: Zehn Modellanalysen Patrick O'Neill Oliver Jahraus and Stefan Neuhaus, eds. Kafkas Urteil und die Literaturtheorie: Zehn Modellanalysen. Reclams Universal-Bibliothek 17636. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2002. 271 pp. Eur 7.10 (Paperback). ISBN 3-15-017636-0. The editors, both faculty members at the Universität Bamberg, acknowledge the similarity of their undertaking to David Wellbery's Positionen der Literaturwissenschaft: Acht Modellanalysen am Beispiel von Kleists 'Das Erdbeben in Chili' (1985), but point also to a central difference. While Wellbery's collection was aimed at literary scholars and theorists, the present volume is intended as a primer, offering a triple introduction: the collection "soll als Einführung in die Methodik der Literaturwissenschaft, als Einführung in die Möglichkeiten der Interpretation eines 'schwierigen' Textes und als Einführung in die Inter-pretation von Kafkas Werk gelesen werden können" (32). The choice of Das Urteil is hardly surprising: Kafka's story occupies fewer than a dozen printed pages and has provoked more than two hundred printed attempts variously to interpret it, explain it, or explain it away. The volume opens with the reprinted text of Das Urteil and gets under way with a briskly efficient introductory chapter by the editors on "Die Methodologie der Literaturwissenschaft und die Kafka-Interpretation," in which they advance the position that theoretical approaches are valuable first and foremost as tools for the interpretation of literary texts. While this is a consciously limited view of the matter, it has an appropriately utilitarian appeal in the pedagogical context, and one can certainly applaud the editorial warning against seeing literary texts merely as vehicles for the demonstration of ever more refined theoretical approaches. This salutary introduction is followed by ten separate chapters focussing on ten different theoretical orientations, namely "Hermeneutik" (Rolf Selbmann), "Strukturalismus" (Michael Scheffel), [End Page 180] "Rezeptionsästhetik" (Stefan Neuhaus), "Sozialgeschichte der Literatur" (Claus-Michael Ort), "Psychoanalytische Literaturinterpretation" (Thomas Anz), "Gender Studies" (Christine Kanz), "Diskursanalyse" (Lothar Bluhm), "Systemtheorie" (Nina Ort), "Intertextualität" (Susanne Schedel), and "Dekonstruktion" (Oliver Jahraus). Each chapter follows a broadly similar strategy, first briefly introducing the chosen theoretical orientation, then suggesting its general relevance to Kafka's writing, and finally examining specific aspects of Das Urteil that achieve special prominence when viewed in the particular light shed by the approach under discussion. Such an organizational strategy could easily become wearying over the course of ten chapters, but happily it does nothing of the sort. Several of the theoretical introductions are minor masterpieces of presentational concision. Nor does the need for brevity lead to a mere mechanical listing of key points, for the presenters do not by any means shy away from interrogating their canonical authorities: in his brief presentation of the essentials of Rezeptionsästhetik, for example, Stefan Neuhaus briskly takes Wolfgang Iser to task for the alleged vagueness of two of his most celebrated concepts, the interpretive Leerstelle and the implied reader. By thus entering immediately into a dialogue with the most authoritative formulations of their particular approach, the introductions have the additional and substantial merit of successfully conveying a sense of the excitement of literary theory, pure or applied, as a discourse permanently under construction and open to debate. Each chapter ends with a concise bibliography of suggested further reading, almost all of it, unsurprisingly for the series, in German or in German translation. The particular selection of theoretical orientations (and their tutelary authority figures, as represented, roughly, by the number of substantive citations) is of interest in itself. The earlier chapters focus on hermeneutics (Schleiermacher, Gadamer, Jauß), structuralist narratology (Genette), and German reader theory (Jauß, Iser); the middle chapters discuss orientations grounded in sociology (Bourdieu, Luhmann), psychoanalysis (Freud rather than Lacan), and gender studies (Judith Butler); the final chapters focus on discourse analysis (Foucault), systems theory (Luhmann), intertextuality (Bakhtin, Kristeva), and deconstruction (Derrida). The reader whose primary interest is in Kafka rather than literary theory will also find much that is stimulating, as in Michael Scheffel's discussion, under the rubric of structuralist narratology, of the fundamental importance of focalization in Das Urteil. Scheffel properly points out, for example (66), that Genette's distinction between narrator and focalizer both obliges and enables the narratological...

Preface

Preface Volume 12 of the Goethe Yearbook is dedicated to its founding editor, Thomas P. Saine. Volume 1 was published in 1982 and expressed the hope that the Goethe Yearbook "would come to be viewed as a natural home for Goethe and Goethe Period studies written in English. . . ." That it has. Through the ten volumes he edited with a combination of openmindedness and editorial rigor, Tom enriched the world of Goethe studies with over 120 contributions with a distinctively North American flavor. If David Wellbery's opening essay on "The Specular Moment" and Hans RudolfVaget 's "Der Schreibakt und der Liebesakt," both in volume 1, set the standard for innovative, risk-taking scholarship, subsequent volumes did not disappoint. To name a few highlights: Géza von Molnár's study of "Goethes Studium der Kritik der Urteilskraft" in volume 2, Suzanne Zantop 's essay on the "Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele" and Jocelyne Kolb's "Presenting the Unpresentable: Goethe's Translation of Le Neveu de Rameau" both in volume 3, W. Daniel Wilson's "Weimar Politics in the Age of the French Revolution" on Goethe and the Uluminati (vol. 5), J. Hillis Miller's Wahlverwandschafien essay (vol. 6), and Jane Brown's "The Queen of the Night and the Crisis of Allegory in The Magic Flute" (vol. 8). These are just a few examples of the pathbreaking scholarship Tom published, regardless of the authors' theoretical inclinations. Of course, Tom may be prouder of other risks that he took, such as publishing the first essays of young authors and advanced graduate students whose articles improved thanks to his assistance and advice. Through his editorial leadership, the Goethe Yearbook won recognition in North America, Germany, the UK and elsewhere. It has become a standard for Goethe scholarship and has certainly more than met the hopes Tom and the founding members of the Goethe Society of North American cherished for it in the early 1980s. In the preface to volume 1, Tom expressed his thanks to "the founding mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles, especially Ehrhard Bahr, Victor Lange, Meredith Lee, Christoph Schweitzer, and Hans R. Vaget." I trust Tom will be pleased that these (to the extent possible ) and many more are among the contributors to volume 12. If we have difficulty imagining a world without the Goethe Yearbook, it is because of Tom. And that in itself is a monument to his editorship. This volume is a token of our thanks. Simon Richter ...

Varieties of Imagination and Nothingness in the Global Village

One of the most remarkable things about the events of September 11th is the extent and degree of their aestheticization. Had the weather in New York on that day been overcast we would have seen the muted television images of a silver passenger plane blended into grey clouds. The plane would have penetrated a building rising out of a skyline absorbed in a neutral horizon. Smoke would have melted into a pallid background. The scene would have been horrible, but not horribly sublime. Had the objectives of the attack been only the Pentagon and, apparently, the White House, we would have been left with visions of the partial destruction of centres of military and political might, their buildings close to the earth and televised as enlarged versions of what we often see in the ordinary course of the daily news: burning buildings. But in New York on September 1 11th the morning sky was a clear expanse of blue. A contrasting band of smoke flowed from the first tower that was struck. And then we saw a plane slice into the other tower as a knife goes into a stick of butter. Against a background of innocent baby blue, black energy poured out of the tall, erect, light grey geometric modernity of the towers. Then after a time they fell into themselves and there was nothing left against the horizon where they had stood except the perfection of the sky itself. Photographs taken near the site caught the tottering facades of the towers that remained standing in the smoke and dust of ground zero. They were horribly beautiful, almost Frank Gehry-like in dishevelled modernity although some saw them as a Gothic cathedral standing amidst ruins. Creating September 11th David Wellbery (2002) of the University of Chicago has described the role of symbols in pragmatic thought and latterly in the work of the German sociological theorist, Niklas Luhmann (2000), as binders of time. Time is a domain of basal improbability, an empty ongoing flow where nothing (nothing) is certain (except death). Nevertheless something (some-thing) can be precipitated in time, something can happen. An improbable episode fills time, an unlikely this transpires rather than any of the other possible but improbable that's. Congealed in memory, the symbolic trace of what happened is raw material for reason, desire and action as future presents that flow into present futures The normal, probable chaos of the present yields to an improbable vector of action whose meaning is found with reference to the symbol. An ongoing something reduces the improbability of something happening in time. Time is contingently bound. The effort to bind time with the symbols of art in the wake of September 11th was almost as remarkable and singular as the events themselves. Horrible beauty found in the perfection of concerted action transmuted into the unforgettable visuals of TV seemed to demand and call forth the symbols of artistic imagination. There was a flood of them. Reporting from New York City for The Globe and Mail, Simon Haupt wrote: Immediately after Sept. 11, thousands of people in this city and around the world set out to capture the meaning of those events through artistic expression. In the intervening months, thousands more have joined the effort, resulting in what may turn out to be the largest creative response in history to a single day's event. Poetry, prose, dance, architecture, photography, soundscapes, TV, popular music, theatre, comic books, film, painting and sculpture: They have all grappled with the attacks and their aftermath, in the process provoking questions about the meaning of art, its practical usefulness, and the legitimacy of artistic aspirations by non-artists (Haupt 2002, R1). How likely is it that this outpouring will produce anything that will bind the time of the public in a definitive and long-lasting way? In other words will there be any great art produced by the immediate rush to aesthetic action? …

Goethe 2000: Intercultural Readings of his Work (review)

Goethe Yearbook 421 Paul Bishop and R. H. Stephenson, eds., Goethe 2000: Intercultural Readings of his Work. Leeds: Northern University Press, 2000. 193 pp. It would have been a delight to have been a fly on the wall in Glasgow in March 1999 in order to eavesdrop on the lively proceedings of the Goethe celebration there. The next best thing is to read the book, even without the dialogue and scholarly give-and-take that are the ineproducible essence of such colloquia. It is refreshing, for instance, to see Goethe—this all-too-German provincial , whose favorite designation, conversely, was "cosmopolitan"—from an international and comparative perspective. It is enlightening to see a range of global topics covered from Brahma over Kabbalah to German-Chinese anniversaries . And it is lovely to hold in one's hands a book treated with such editorial and aesthetic care by its editors: Witness, as just the most obvious example, the reproduction on the cover of Michael Mathias Prechtl's Der Naturforscher J. W. Goethe im Farbenkreis. But just what is meant by "intercultural"? Gordon A. Burgess ventures the most outright, yet most limited definition of intercultural practice: a refusal to interpret "by any narrow reference to time or place or specific events" (14546 ). To me that sounds suspiciously like retrograde motion: a close (or closed) or hermeneutic reading with a passport. Yet it is clear from the methodology of Paul Bishop's "intercultural glance" at the "Chinesisch-Deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten" that "intercultural" attempts a reformulation of the concept Weltliteratur in theoretical terms: a synthesis of semiotics, the aesthetics of science, and an "encounter between different cultures" (88). And in terms of postmodernist space, the "intercultural" undoubtedly provides a virtual chat room with plenty of corners for scholars to rub elbows. In fact, the essays collected here (eight in English, two in German) represent six loosely defined, loosely related stages in the development of what began as comparative literature in the American academy in the 30s under Wellek and Warren . A number of contributions here are warhorses that still meet that original charge of intellectual history and of aesthetic relationships going beyond nationalism : Andrew Fineron's study of the genesis of Paria; Shona M. Allan's empirical reading of analogies between Goethe and Byron; the capstone lecture on Ernst Cassirer, delivered peripherally to the colloquium by John Michael Krois. A second category, theory, is keynoted by David Wellbery's semiotic discussion of origins in the young Goethe, and supplemented by Patricia D. Zecervic's feminist reading of the Kabbalah and Wilhelm Meister. Burgess's reading of Die natürliche Tochter strikes me as straightforward Germanistik, despite his intention of reading Goethe 's relative silence on the French Revolution. Two hybrids of comparative literature , revisionism and speculative history, provide fireworks: In the best tradition of Eliot influencing Shakespeare, Alberto Destro rewrites Goethe as a decadent in the image of Huysman; Werner Schwan gives a nuanced, theatrical twist to the old what-if? question, "War Weimar ein Irrtum Goethes?" (128). Finally, Bishop's paper is a splendid microcosm of cultural studies, which is the all-encompassing category of which the intercultural is a subset, not necessarily a link or connection. And a conservative subset at that. A nod at what's missing—in terms of geography , in terms of issues, in terms of methods—is indicative, even indicting. There 422 Book Reviews is no Africa or Latin America (barely any NAFTA at all) in this Glasgowian Goethe. If Goethe has an economic or political impact—or if postcolonial smdies have any use for Goethe—you would not know it from the view from Glasgow. But let me not allow who is not there and what is not said to spoil the delight in what can be overheard here. In one corner of this intercultural room (on the other side of the room from the theorists), Feneron would be reminding Schwan that when Goethe looks East (toward the India of Paria), he really has his eye on the Old German of the Hildebrandtslied and, tellingly, the Reformation (44). Schwan would counter that it was really Goethe, not Tom Stoppard, who in Wilhelm Meister wrote the original script...

From Genre to Gender: On Goethe's "Der Wandrer"

ELIZABETH POWERS From Genre to Gender: On Goethe's "Der Wandrer" THOUGH IMITATION HAS HISTORICALLY been the predominant force in artistic production, in the course of the eighteenth century artists sought to emancipate themselves from the practice of imitation. In this respect, Goethe's work, despite clear evidence of its reliance on previous literary models, has rightly been seen as representing a break with this practice. In an interpretative tradition influenced by Wilhelm Dilthey's insights, this break has been characterized not simply as a break with the past but also as a break with the artifactual nature of art, instead translating "experience" into poetic formulation.1 I have tried to show that the so-called experience (Erlebnis) that Goethe's work seems to evidence instead reflects this poetic emancipation : experience is what one has when one doesn't do what everyone else does. In poetic terms, this means not following a model, not being limited by the restrictions of genre. Thus, as I have argued in another context,2 the Sesenheim idyll depicted in Dichtung und Wahrheit, whatever its reality content, represents one of the inherited literary forms from which Goethe had to free himself, while the charms and beauty of Friederike Brion represent the spell that such forms exert. Ultimately , Goethe's rejection of Friederike indicates his poetic emancipation . At the same time, the idyll at Sesenheim has been richly interpreted as a love affair of a certain sort. But love affairs are what young men had (I speak now of the eighteenth century) who did not conform to traditional expectations—marriage to the first suitable female followed by confining domesticity. Read in this light, the idyll also reflects the restricted circumstances of the traditional order of life from which men (and, in the first instance, they were men) began to emancipate themselves in the eighteenth century. This pattern of "experience"—the individual's rejection of traditional expectations in order to forge a destiny that was sui generis — finds a counterpart in a word that enjoyed wide currency in the eighteenth century, namely, "originality." This term, however, meaning "having no origins," being indebted to no literary progenitors, is clearly at odds with its etymology. It is a rhetorical move asserting its escape from genealogy, Hterary or otherwise. 32 Elizabeth Powers The biological metaphors point up the inability to escape from our human, creaturely condition: none of us arises ex nihilo, and even the crafting of a language of "individual" expression means of necessity wresting it from the language already spoken by one's poetic predecessors . The eighteenth-century use of such metaphors conveys a realignment in the conception of poetic creativity, a realignment that finds its most comprehensive expression in Goethe's work. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, Goethe felt something like piety toward tradition, toward what had been passed down, particularly its vital role in forming the artist. It could not have been otherwise , since his entire poetic oeuvre was indebted to all the writers he had read as a child and went on reading, and whom, with his apparently prodigious memory, unfailing ear, and gift for mimicry, he absorbed into the body of that work until the end of his life. His loving and brilliant reconstruction of various traditional orders in Dichtung und Wahrheit—I am thinking of those portions that depict the patriarchal world of the Old Testament, the empire at the height of its brilliance , and the sacramental character of Roman Catholicism—is not that of an iconoclast. It is clear, however, that for Goethe such institutions no longer provided existential and certainly not artistic grounding. While these set pieces depict the great richness and power of inherited forms of life, their presence in a work that concerns Goethe's artistic development only highlights their insufficiency. They thus serve to stage the transition from the old certainties—what David Wellbery has called the "pre-established generic code," which, as he points out, had literary as well as larger cultural implications—to a new order.4 In poetic terms, this order marks a departure from the classical manner by which poets acknowledged their literary genealogy and grafted their own voices onto an evolving...

Mimesis und Simulation (review)

Mimesis und Simulation combines a multitude of perspectives and methodologies, ranging from new interpretations of Aristotelian poetics to elaborations on postmodern art, from studies of Medieval and Renaissance literature to inquiries of Romanticism and Modernism, and from historical to linguistic analyses. Consequently, this volume presents the reader with neither a coherent history nor an exhaustive semantic study of the terms "mimesis" and "simulation," but rather establishes a variety of profiles which center on one guiding question: how "reality" is related to, i.e. is postulated as anterior to or regarded as a product of "representation." Mimesis, as the article by David Wellbery suggests, is concerned with the representation of real or ideal realities, whereas simulation questions the reality of such representation, that is, pertains to representational realities. Given, however, that many disciplines today accept a more or less constructivist understanding of "reality," the distinction between mimesis and simulation is not as dramatic as we (following Jean Baudriallard) might have anticipated. By reevaluating the status of "reality" as upheld by the traditional concept of mimesis, the book capitalizes on the current discussions about simulation in order to reconstruct the many historical facets of the term mimesis and to demonstrate aspects of the historical contiguity between mimesis and simulation. Within different aesthetic disciplines, mimesis assumes increasing autonomy with regard to the "reality" it proclaims to imitate. Today this development culminates where mimesis is understood as a subcategory of simulation, not as its opposite, but instead itself involved in the construction of representational realities.

Topographies (review)

THE COMPAKATIST cultural ("hegemonic") tradition(s). Transformative strategies and re-visioning postures associated witii critical rereading are in fact mentioned by many contributors , but the collection fails to describe rereading either as a conscious, culturally stimulated activity or as a natural, inevitable outgrowth ofdie continuing reading process. It merely suggests that "reading as rereading opens up a temporal space of reading, an irreducible difference in the time that we take to read" (14). Also puzzling is the editor's decision to include Maurice Blanchot's "Reading ." The essay is apparently meant for those readers who cannot find their critical niche in either direction emphasized by Bennett: that readers are the product of historical/social concerns, or mat even as individuals they are multiple. Blanchot holds that reading, for readers, is the reverse offinding an identity, that it is in fact, a "dissolution ofdie . . . sense ofself" (188), a position that undermines everydiing this collection has tried to establish concerning the interactive, transformative aspects of reading as a conscious act. His theory robs text and reader of cultural context, presenting each as an entity "torn from its place" (190). (Georges Poulet, whose "criticism ofidentification" encourages readers to identify with the spirit of the work, may have been a more suitable—and certainly less radical—inclusion at this point in the collection.) For Blanchot, reading merely affirms the existence of the work: "The book needs the reader to become a statue" (191)—immutable, unchanging , a "tranquil and silent presence" (194) that produces nothing. Blanchot is clearly among those famousely described by Bardies in S/Z, "who ... are obliged to read the same story everywhere." Robin Rison Ashworth Virginia Commonwealth University J. HILLIS MILLER Topographies. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. 376 pp. Topographies is more manjust J. Hillis Miller's most recent book (published in the Crossing Aesthetics series edited by Werner Hamacher and David Wellbery). The title is, in fact, a perfect introduction to me subject-matter and a most concise synthesis ofthe critic's method as well. A former member of the so-called Yale School with Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, and Geoffrey Hartman, Miller is by now a prolific author in whose work a phenomenological heritage is blended with a rare talent for "deconstructive" reading. To be sure, after the phenomenological period at Johns Hopkins, when Miller practiced a comprehensive criticism of identification, two other important moments followed: his affiliation with the Yale School, and the current post-Yale sequel at the University of California, Irvine. However, Miller never really lost touch during his Yale and Irvine phases with phenomenology as a reading strategy for unifying die subject and the object. In this connection, it should be recalled that at the time of The Disappearance ofGodand Poets ofReality, phenomenological criticism acted mainly as a challenge to New Criticism and its general aim ofestablishing a more "objective" approach to literature. A similar polemical note appeared in Miller's work, except that what for other interpreters was a political strategy dictated by the urgency ofdie moment, was for Miller more abiding: phenomenolVoI . 21 (1997): 163 REVZEWS ogy never vanished from his critical practice. Georges Poulet has remained a strong influence, along with an unbroken faiui in a sort of"humanistic" outlook on literature which emphasizes thejoy ofreading. The chapter on Derrida in Topographies reformulates the two main directions ofMiller's phenomenological career: phenomenology as a reading technique and as programmatic polemics. The act ofreading especially has capital significance for understanding Miller's evolution. The critic constantly reinforces the idea that, for him, deconstruction is nothing else but "good reading," and that the central difficulty in criticism arises wim our choice ofwhat to read. This necessarily leads to die ethical question: why does one choose to examine Trollope's fiction instead of Wilde's, for instance? The answer, at least for Miller, seems to be one ofthe definitions ofdeconstruction, which is a critical metiiod based on "me ethics ofreading." In other words, "ediics" is a signifier for the subjective affinity, or the phenomenological principle ofidentification, whereas deconstruction stands for the signified, the way to give one's textual choice a proper and comprehensive reading. This theoretical shift distances Miller within the Yale School from...

Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century (review)

Reviews Veronica Kelly and Dorotìiea E. von Mücke, eds. Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. ? + 349pp. US$42.50 (cloth); US$15.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8047-2269-2. Of the twelve essays in this collection, six—including the three most memorable ones— focus more or less on eighteenth-century fiction. Best of the lot is David Wellbery's splendid essay on Werther. Everyone knows that Goethe's novel lives from the rush of feeling; Wellbery employs Lacanian concepts with minute discrimination to analyse the rush. It comes from what he calls the phantasm of the absolute body, a liquid, maternal sexuality, ambiguous and pre-semantic, hence not amenable to referential or ideological decoding. Corresponding to these absorptive emotions is a model ofreading as immersion, as response to voice rather than to meaning; that is how Herder and Goethe read Homer (who climaxes the novel's first half) and, even more, Ossian (who replaces Homer in the second half). In accounting for the novel's gestures Wellbery reflects on his own interpretive procedures, doubling the novel's representation of language with a theory of reading. Critiques of other critics' procedures, of particular readings of Werther, and of general views of its period emerge almost of themselves. The broadly familiar categories respect prior scholarship, while the details are fresh and rich and the synthesis original. Two other distinguished essays are Chris Cullens's spirited account of Mary "Perdita" Robinson's transvestite novel Walsingham, Or the Pupil ofNature (1796), and Helmut Schneider's close reading of the rhetoric of Kleist's "Über das Marionettentheater." CuIlens convincingly ties Robinson's zany mélange of gender-bending and revanchism both to her personal situation as successful but maligned actress and to the dynamics of psychosocial identity construction in the period. While a flailing unicum like this book (Cullens colourfully says that it "pendulates largely," p. 288) does not foster Wellbery's exemplary methodological self-consciousness, Cullens's thematic discussions (of parentage , masquerade, costume, and much else) resonate widely with other works, either in sympathy or in counterpoint. Schneider pointedly refines deconstructive accounts by de Man, Chase, and others, to highlight the mechanics of Kleist's rhetoric and to reveal the work as anti-idealist and constructivist—a fall back into materiality, not forward into revelation. Three other essays feature fictional texts. Elizabeth Heckendom Cook's "The Limping Woman and the Public Sphere" traverses the collection's principal themes as instanced EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 8, Number 1, October 1995 144 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:1 in Montesquieu's Lettres persanes: formal embodiment, political embodiment, gendered and disfigured bodies. The parts are strong (as is some material on political economy), but not all the links; talk of "a kind ofcultural paternal death" (p. 25, emphasis added), for instance, makes analogy do too much of the work. Cook's first paragraph illustrates another difficulty that is rather widespread in the volume. It claims that the fictional "scene of writing," with its imagined "traces of a bodily origin," "constructs the writing subject as corporeal" and thus "helps institutionalize a modem understanding of subjectivity as embedded in and inseparable from a discrete body, a notion of individual identity that can be summed up as the body/subject" (p. 23). This progression from materiality to corporeality to subjectivity presumes a stable concept of the body; yet that is exactly what is in question, above all in the postmodem contexts evoked by phrases such as "scene of writing" and "traces." Thomas diPiero argues for a verisimilitude of the unrepresentable in Sade's Justine that defies ideological rationalization. I am not surejust what verisimilitude means here or why he needs the term (which he borrows from Genette), and the negative result, while persuasive, falls short of the specificity of readings ranging in method from, say, Barthes (only some of whose work on Sade is cited) to Brissenden (who is not). Tassie Gwilliam's essay on cosmetics is divided between an Oriental tale, Abdeker: Or the Art ofPreserving Beauty (English translation, 1754), and a play, The New Cosmetic, or The Triumph of Beauty, A Comedy (1790)—two works whose confused ideologies foreground competing processes...