Ludwig Tieck Research Articles

In praise of nonsense: Kant and Bluebeard

1. Introduction: nonsense, Victorian nonsense, Romantic nonsense 2. Kant on 'nonsense', 'laughing', and 'caprice' 3. The poetics of nonsense and the early romantic thoery of the fairy tale 4. Between the addition and subtraction of sense - Charles Perrault's La Barbe-Bleue 5. 'A book without and coherence' - Ludwig Tieck's The Seven Wives of Bluebeard 6. Suspensions of 'sense' in Genre theories of the fairy tale Notes Bibliography.

Eighteenth-Century Swiss Peasant Meets Bard: Ulrich Bräker's A Few Words About William Shakespeare's Plays (1780)

Britain began making Shakespeare her national poet early in the eighteenth century, and Germany followed suit a few decades later, progressively turning ‘unser Shakespeare’ into one of three national poets, with Goethe and Schiller. As early as 1773, Johann Gottfried Herder included his essay on ‘Shakespear’ in a collection entitled Von Deutscher Art und Kunst. The drama of the ‘Sturm und Drang’, which Herder's collection programmatically inaugurated, appropriated what Goethe (Götz von Berlichingen), Schiller (The Robbers) and their contemporaries (mis)understood to be Shakespeare's dramatic technique. By the end of the century, the assimilation had advanced far enough for August Wilhelm von Schlegel, the famous translator of seventeen of Shakespeare's plays, to indulge in no slight national chauvinism: ‘I am eager’, he writes in a letter to his cotranslator Ludwig Tieck, ‘to have your letters on Shakespeare.… I hope you will prove, among other things, that Shakespeare wasn't English. I wonder how he came to dwell among the frosty, stupid souls on that brutal island? … The English critics understand nothing about Shakespeare.’ Even though Tieck failed to prove that Shakespeare was not of English birth, the conviction that Shakespeare was best understood by German rather than by English critics only grew in the course of the nineteenth century. Appropriately, it was in Germany that the first periodical devoted exclusively to Shakespeare, the Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, was founded in 1865. Fifty years later, the German novelist Gerhart Hauptmann could still claim that ‘there is no people, not even the English, that has the same right to claim Shakespeare as the German. Shakespeare's characters are a part of our world, his soul has become one with ours: and though he was born and buried in England, Germany is the country where he truly lives.’

The Contours of the Visual Arts in Tieck's Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen: Text/Image/Phantasm

One of the chief concerns of German Romanticism is the nature of the relationship between the subjective character of perception and its artistic representation. The Romantics asked, moreover, whether the possibility of that representation somehow presupposes a clear and certain answer to the question as to whether there exists a world external to our perception of it. This was by no means a settled score for German Romantic thought. If there is anything beyond our )wing: internal perceptions, then, for the Romantics, both canvas and page become sites of contestation, as they are the spaces on which ephemeral experience is said to be represented in the material world. Art understood in these terms becomes the point at which something absent and intangible appears present and graspable. :land The fact that it exists simultaneously in the spaces of the material world and in pry the imagination produces contradictory relations of presence and absence -e reflected in figures such as metaphors and in psychological formations such as fetishes that have similar structures in that they invoke something intangible ty beyond that which is available to the hand or eye. These questions date at least ity as far back as antiquity, but in order to discuss them as they figure in German ty Romantic thought, and in particular that of Ludwig Tieck, we will begin with an Enlightenment treatment of the question, that of Lessing, as his aesthetic rloo arguments render explicit the division between the material world and the space iversity of consciousness. In this sense, the Romantic representation of the problem can be understood as an extended rhapsody on this Enlightenment theme. his support. In Laokoon, oder fiber die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie Lessing prescriptively outlines the boundaries of poesie and the visual arts, with the

Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Theatre

In his richly detailed, beautifully illustrated history of Shakespeare's most popular play - the first comprehensive study of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the theatre - Gary Jay Williams covers four hundred years of landmark productions in Europe, the United States, and Canada as well as important opera, dance, and film adaptations. Williams shows how the visual and musical vocabularies of production can be read as cultural texts and how these mediative texts determine this play's available meanings from generation to generation. His account, then, is the story of our imaginative and astonishing uses of Shakespeare's play. Williams offers detailed theatrical and cultural analyses of the productions of David Garrick, Ludwig Tieck, Elizabeth Vestris, Charles Kean, Harley Granville-Barker, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Max Reinhardt, Peter Brook, Liviu Ciulei, and other artists. His engaging, intelligent study will be invaluable to scholars and teachers of Shakespeare and theatre history and to professional directors, designers, critics, and actors.

The Crises of "Language and Dead Signs" in Ludwig Tieck's Prose Fiction

The Crises of "Language and Dead Signs" in Ludwig Tieck's Prose Fiction

Laboratoire d’une nouvelle forme d’art : l’édition des Minnelieder (1803) illustrée par Philipp Otto Runge

A new form of art laboratory : the Minnelieder edition 1803 illustrated by Philipp Otto Runge. In 1803, the writer Ludwig Tieck asks the painter Philipp Otto Runge to create drawings in order to illustrate his translation of a collection of troubadour songs. Backed up by a genetic conception of art history, this project attests their expectation of a new artistic period. While for Tieck the Minnelieder translation constitutes the necessary step towards the awareness of the specificity of an incoming poetry, for Runge, through their code of symbols, the illustrations appear as the forerunners of an unprecedented landscape art. Both feel that a bridge can be thrown over between poetry and plastic art, owing to their common « musicality», thereby endangering the doctrine of their compartimentalization advocated by the upholders of neoclassicism. This aspect comes to light as well in Tieck’s foreword, opening the collection, as in the conception of the Landschafterey which occupies Runge since 1802. The question of the relation between text and image raised by the illustration therefore undergoes a profound renewal. But, though in theory they appear to agree, the realization of the work discloses deep divergences between the two men, and its publication will put the seal on their break-up.

Our moonlight revels: A midsummer night's dream in the theatre

In his richly detailed, beautifully illustrated history of Shakespeare's most popular play - the first comprehensive study of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the theatre - Gary Jay Williams covers four hundred years of landmark productions in Europe, the United States, and Canada as well as important opera, dance, and film adaptations. Williams shows how the visual and musical vocabularies of production can be read as cultural texts and how these mediative texts determine this play's available meanings from generation to generation. His account, then, is the story of our imaginative and astonishing uses of Shakespeare's play. Williams offers detailed theatrical and cultural analyses of the productions of David Garrick, Ludwig Tieck, Elizabeth Vestris, Charles Kean, Harley Granville-Barker, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Max Reinhardt, Peter Brook, Liviu Ciulei, and other artists. His engaging, intelligent study will be invaluable to scholars and teachers of Shakespeare and theatre history and to professional directors, designers, critics, and actors.

The Crises of "Language and Dead Signs" in Ludwig Tieck's Prose Fiction

The Crises of "Language and Dead Signs" in Ludwig Tieck's Prose Fiction

The crises of "language and dead signs" in Ludwig Tieck's prose fiction

The crises of "language and dead signs" in Ludwig Tieck's prose fiction

Ludwig Tieck as the Champion of Shakespeare's Apocrypha in Germany

L'A. mesure la contribution de L. Tieck a la reception de Shakespeare en Allemagne. Son interet pour la question de la paternite shakespearienne des pieces apocryphes du theâtre elisabethain, et son effort continu en vue d'une traduction allemande satisfaisante des oeuvres classiques, s'inscrivent dans le cadre d'un projet d'etude globale sur Shakespeare qui n'a jamais vu le jour, et relevent d'un attachement particulier pour la biographie du poete dramatique

Fairy stories for very sophisticated children: Ludwig Tieck‘s Phantasus

Judging from repetitious appearances of her marital arms in the painted line-endings, the Psalter-Hours John Rylands Library Latin MS 117 probably belonged to Jeanne of Flanders (c.1272–1333), daughter of Count Robert III of Flanders and in 1288 second wife to Enguerrand IV of Coucy. Yet the line-endings also contain some 1,800 diminutive painted escutcheons, many of which refer to other members of the local nobility active during the 1280s. This study, based on an exhaustive survey of the total heraldic and codicological evidence, suggests that the majority of the extant Psalter predated the Hours and that the two parts were combined after the 1288 marriage. The ‘completed’ manuscript bears witness to major events that unfolded in and around the Coucy barony over the course of the decade. It suggests a complex relationship between Jeanne of Flanders and a lesser member of the local nobility, a certain Marien of Moÿ, who may have served as her attendant.

Ludwig Tieck: an annotated guide to research

Ludwig Tieck: an annotated guide to research

Echoes of Novalis and Tieck in Büchner's Lenz

As a poetic statement on the mission and fate of an artist-figure, Lenz bears comparison with some of its Early Romantic predecessors. The similarities and differences revealed are illuminating as to Georg Buchner's post-Romantic view of the nature and function of the poet. In particular Novalis's Hymnen an die Nacht and Ludwig Tieck's Der Runenberg – works often compared in theme and imagery, and very likely linked by a relationship of influence and response' – are called to mind by both basics and details of Buchner's story. Like them, for example, Lenz involves the struggle of an artist-figure to convey a sense of beauties weighing against individuation and mortality. It also shares with them a variety of motifs and images: the topography of mountains and plains, or the motif of Wanderer and Hutte, for example, to depict the poet's progress to insight, or the references to crystalline and fluid to describe the harmony of all things that he senses. Finally, it echoes those accounts of the artist's emergence in a complex way: at times paralleling the ascent of the Romantic artist to insight, then diverging from that positive line to stress his problematic relationship to reality. Closer consideration of these comparisons and contrasts can follow two possible lines. It can initiate critical reflection on whether Buchner was influenced by these Early Romantic works or even intended his story to parody them.' It can also lead – whether or not influence or parodic intent can be established – to insights on how Buchner's story expresses his era's changing view of the artistic existence. I propose to follow these two approaches in turn to contribute suggestions about how Lenz reveals Buchner's revision of the Romantic ideal to be a

Brahms's Magelone Romanzen and the "Romantic Imperative"

B rahms's Opus 33 Magelone Romanzen, composed between 1861 and 1869, occupy a most unusual position within his corpus of works. So far as the music is concerned, there is a marked departure from the idealized Volkslied style to which Brahms aspired in most of his songs. And while most song cycle texts are usually assembled from a pre-existent lyric cycle (e.g., Schubert's Die 343 Schine Miillerin), from a single poet's output (e.g., Schumann's Opus 24 Heine settings), or from unrelated poems fashioned into a narrative or associative sequence by the composer himself, here Brahms chose to set the interpolated verse in an old Volksmdrchen elaborated in the form of the contemporary Kunstmdrchen, Ludwig Tieck's Wundersame Liebesgeschichte der schinen Magelone und des Grafen Peter aus der Provence.l The idea of setting interpolated lyrics to music was not a new one, witness the numerous settings of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister poetry. But Goethe's verses are integral only to limited portions of his Bildungsroman; in Tieck's Magelone, a lyric poem of large dimensions is a regular feature in each of the Mdrchen's eighteen brief chapters.

Ludwig Tieck. A Literary Biography

Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) was a major figure in German cultural life, a poet, playwright, and novelist who was also an influential art and theater critic, the editor of Kleist and Novalis, and the prime force behind the famous Schegel-Tieck translation of Shakespeare. His was a long and prolific career, which began in the last decades of Frederick the Great's reign, and ended in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution, and his varied literary output reflected the progress and the shifting emphasis of the Romantic movement. In this biography, Roger Paulin attempts to capture, through the study of the work of this remarkable man, the climate of Romanticism, tracing its progress from a movement of aesthetic protest to one of national awareness.

German Romance and American Romance: Influences of Ludwig Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann on Nathaniel Hawthrone

German Romance and American Romance: Influences of Ludwig Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann on Nathaniel Hawthrone

Unholy Alliances: Narrative Ambiguity in Tieck's "Der blonde Eckbert"

ed from the text than on the figurative meaning of the superhuman personage who disrupts the tranquillity of Eckbert and Bertha's domestic life. Once critics agree that a text belongs to the category of the marvelous, they still have the privilege of disagreeing about the symbolic meaning of the supernatural agents or events in the text. The Old Woman, alias Walther, has been seen alternately as an agent of justice, as nature personified, as the of revenge, and as the incarnation of fate.9 Characters persecuted by supernatural powers larger than life tend to lose their capacity to act as free agents and to become victims of forces beyond their control. Fantastic literature, especially when it shades into the marvelous, is primarily a literature of victimization. What has happened to me? the startled protagonists ask with the same sense of bewilderment that Gregor Samsa voices upon awakening from his strange dreams into an even stranger reality. But supernatural agents, especially the Romantic variety, are rarely so capricious as to invade the ordinary world without some anterior cause or provocation, and if Bertha and Eckbert become the targets of the Old Woman's wrath, there must be a reason why they are singled out for persecution. As we learn 9 For Gerhard Haeuptner, Walther, Hugo, and the peasant are all Gestalten des vergeltenden Wiedergangertums (Ludwig Tiecks Marchen 'Der blonde Eckbert,' in Verstehen und Vertrauen: Otto Friedrich Bollnow zum 65. Geb'urtstag, ed. Johannes Schwartlander [Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1968], pp. 22-26). Raimund Belgardt views the Old Woman as the spirit of revenge (Poetic Imagination and External Reality in Tieck: From Divergence to Convergence, in Essays on German Literature in honour of G. Joyce Hallamore, ed. Michael S. Batts and Marketa Goetz Stankiewicz [Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1968], 41-61). In a Jungian interpretation of Tieck's story, V. C. Hubbs identifies the Old Woman as Personifikation alles Mutterlichen (Tieck, Eckbert und das kollektive UnbewuBte, PMLA, 71 [1956], 686-93). Richard W. Kimpel sees her as a personification of the naturespirit (Nature, Quest, and Reality in Tieck's Der blonde Eckbert and Der Runenberg, Studies in Romanticism, 9 [1970], 176-92); Otto K. Liedke sees her as a Natursymbol (Tieck's Der blonde Eckbert: Das Marchen von Verarmung und Untergang, German Quarterly, 44 [1971], 311-16). Emil Staiger emphasizes that the figure of the Old Woman is charged with moral ambiguity: Ist Walter [sic], die Alte, vielleicht ein Symbol der menschenfeindlichen Schicksalsmacht? Warum dann aber der Vogel mit seinem holden Lied von der Waldeinsamkeit? (Ludwig Tieck und der Ursprung der deutschen Romantik, in his Stilwandel: Studien zur Vorgeschichte der Goethezeit [Zurich: Atlantis, 1963], p. 189). This content downloaded from 157.55.39.35 on Fri, 02 Sep 2016 06:11:36 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Roger Paulin,Ludwig Tieck. A literary biography.

Roger Paulin,<i>Ludwig Tieck. A literary biography.</i>

Perspectives on Language in Ludwig Tieck's Epistolary Novel William Lovell

It is surprising that Tieckian criticism has paid scant attention to the dilemma of linguistic expressiveness ubiquitously encountered and enunciated within the epistolary novel Geschichte des Herrn William Lovell (1795-96). The most comprehensive study to date on this subject is that of Ernst Ribbat, whose main thesis focuses on the extent to which the complex web of correspondence reveals differing levels of social intercommunication. Ribbat arrives at the conclusion that Tieck has presented im Gattungsrahmen des Briefromans kommunikative Beziehungen . . . , zugleich deren Krise,' an application of Marianne Thalmann's generalized observation that the epistolary novel constitutes die ideale Form, Krisenzustiinde auszudriicken.2 Ribbat supplies a pertinent though limited assortment of text citations to demonstrate various conceptions of language for which the novel provides a framework. It is my aim to broaden the nature of the investigation by including a fuller range of sprachphilosophische viewpoints and by measuring such pronouncements against the established Sprachtheorien of the Rationalists and Early Romantics. It will also be important to consider Tieck's own stance on the whole vexing issue of linguistic definition despite a paucity of autobiographical cues. Although Tieck's Verbildungsroman traces the labyrinth of entangled thoughts and sentiments of its titular hero (or anti-hero) in his trek through phases of idealism, sensualism and occultism in search of an identity, there is nevertheless some verifiable consistency underlying Lovell's reflections on the adequacy of language. As a Triebmensch rarely successful in curbing his emotions, even during periods of extreme cynicism and ironic detachment from his fellow men, Lovell clings persistently to the primacy of feeling as the measure of all things, an attitude linking him with his literary ancestor Werther. However, Lovell discovers much to his chagrin that the effusiveness of the heart is never matched by a linguistic eloquence capable of doing it full

Self-Reflexive Siblings: Incest as Narcissism in Tieck, Wagner, and Thomas Mann

The obvious allusion to the myth of Narcissus in this context reveals the underlying nature of the incestuous bond: erotic energy is transferred from the narcissistic individual to the object most like himself, his sibling. In discussing therapeutic mirror Heinz Kohut, whose theories on the treatment of narcissism rely heavily on Freud's introductory work in the field,2 refers to alter-ego transference or twinship. In this transitional phase of therapy the narcissistic patient transfers his ego-ideal to the analyst, but still imagines him to be similar or even identical to his grandiose conception of himself.3 The case of Siegmund and Sieglinde is analogous: each experiences longing for an other, distinct being, but desires in that being primarily the reflection of its own. Like the related theme of the doppelganger,4 incestuous narcissism is particularly prevalent in Romantic and neo-Romantic literature, where it appears as an image of isolation. But the isolating circumstances and, correspondingly, the nature of the incestuous bond vary in their depiction from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, reflecting shifts in the intellectual atmosphere of the time. These variations may be demonstrated through a comparison of three paradigmatic examples from the German tradition: Ludwig Tieck's Der blonde Eckbert, published in 1797; Wagner's Die Walkare, the libretto of which was completed in 1852; and Thomas Mann's Walsungenblut, written in 1905. In all three works narcissism in the guise of incest is a particularly effective expression of the individual's exclusion from society, since it adds the solitude of self-love to the guilt of a sexual taboo. Yet in each