292 Book Reviews "Bild" over the original. Birch-Pfeiffer's heroine Ellena has a similar problem in Rubens in Madrid (1836), where her portrait is more important to Rubens and her husband than she is—though for different reasons. Ellena dislikes the portrait—perhaps mistaking the artist's purpose in painting it: "Ich soll das sein?—O nimmer! Es ist ähnlich, / Ich fühl' es, ähnlich, dennoch bin ich's nicht" (170, Birch-Pfeiffer's emphasis). Not surprisingly, Rubens doesn't care whether she likes it. He does. This appropriation of a woman's image by a writer or artist, as well as the hierarchy of artist over model or muse, is a commonplace that rarely receives scrutiny—Klaus Theweleit's Buch der Könige being a very recent example—and it is fascinating to hear of the existence of these and other plays that seek to sensitize an audience to the effects of this collaboration on the muse. Goethe addresses the muse's position briefly in Tasso, but his princess properly insists on her position as mere image. The heroines mentioned above offer us an entirely different perspective. It is impossible to do justice to the scope and intricacy of Kord's study in a book review. I have tried to give a variety of examples of her method and her concerns, but the references and excerpts here represent only about 10-15% of the text section, which moves through many more thematic groupings and sub-groupings and should be read in its entirety. Kord treats her texts respectfully, as the serious (and often successful) rhetorical efforts they were, and she uncovers intriguing configurations that broaden and in many instances change our understanding of women and drama in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though their works tend not to be collected and preserved in published editions, during this period Shakespeare 's sisters were enormously prolific in German-speaking lands. This was news to me and I suspect it will be to many others. We should be grateful to Susanne Kord for sharing this news with us. University of California, Irvine Gail K. Hart Herder Yearbook. Publications of the International Herder Society, ed. Karl Menges, Wulf Koepke, Wilfried Maisch. Vol. I. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1992. The editors preface this first volume of the Herder Yearbook with a brief account of the current renaissance in Herder scholarship. In addition to three new editions in Germany and an English edition being prepared in the United States, they cite the number of conference papers, scholarly articles , and books devoted to Herder, not simply as self-justifying raison d'etre, but as evidence that the yearbook itself is part of a pervasive rediscovery and reappraisal of Herder's contributions to cultural anthropology, aesthetics and literary hermeneutics, the theories of language and history. In the context of the current postmodernist debate, Herder's writings have gained new relevance. The editors of this volume have balanced the essays Goethe Yearbook 293 addressing current issues in critical theory with several essays devoted to historical and textual problems. In the first essay, "Language and the Ear: From Derrida to Herder," Jürgen Trabant makes use of a remarkable pastiche of quotations from Saint Augustine, Du Bellay, and Nietzsche, as well as Derrida and Herder, to document the historical rivalry between the concepts of language as the spoken word and as the written text. In elaborating the case for language as auditory phenomenon, Trabant finds Herder's celebration of the man's response to the lamb in the Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache an effective contrast to Derrida's deprecation of "Ce chien de phonographe." The voice-ear reciprocity, Trabant argues, functions at a more spontaneously subjective and emotional level than the objective and rational eyehand facility required in reading and writing. Therefore the oral-aural processes of language may be associated with subtle subliminal appeal. Trabant suggests that the power of such appeal has etymological verification in such words as obedience C= obaudientia) and Hörigkeit (from hören). What is needed is Herder's "Nemesis" to restore balance, to liberate language from the rational primacy of the eye-hand dominance and enable us "to listen...
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Mar 20, 2021
Petru Marian Călinescu 
