Reviewed by: Penthesileas Versprechen. Exemplarische Studien über die literarische Referenz Erika Berroth Penthesileas Versprechen. Exemplarische Studien über die literarische Referenz. Herausgegeben von Rüdiger Campe. Freiburg: Rombach, 2008. 374 Seiten. €44,00. Dedicated to the memory of Bianca Theisen, who had planned the collection of critical essays together with editor Rüdiger Campe, this volume offers thirteen exemplary studies on Kleist's drama Penthesilea. Campe defines in his introduction how the term "exemplary" is to be understood in the context of this project. Kleist's text itself, crafted between 1806 and 1808, figures as a precursor in exemplarity in terms of its theatrical and thematic dimensions. Penthesilea presupposed, for example, a nonexistent dramaturgy and a never-constructed stage. This original, novel, non-canonical, outrageous (see Goethe's judgment about the play) pre-text then precisely triggers those studies that develop and define methods of reading and understanding the precursor, resulting in an inter-play of cross-references of the exemplary in the primary text and the exemplary in its interpretations. Campe's project of bringing together this collection is motivated by his observation of a surge in Penthesilea studies over the past 25 years in Kleist scholarship in the USA and Europe, forming two significant clusters. One such area of critical attention is an intensive focus on language textures, the other is the extensive study of cultural contexts of the drama, including gender arrangements and military practices as well as political affairs, with the two often seeming mutually exclusive in their approaches, so that the original unity of the drama becomes a blind spot. Fascinated by this mutual exclusion in critical readings, Campe situates Penthesilea scholarship at the intersection of the debate on the relationship of literature and culture studies that permeates the 1980s and 1990s and its differing approaches to European Germanistik and Kulturwissenschaft and US German Studies or Cultural Studies contexts. Campe argues for approaches that respect the unity and continuity of the primary text by envisioning the borders between intensive and extensive approaches as pliable and permeable for a productive interplay of focusing or foregrounding texts and contexts. As an organizing principle for the collection, Campe, with a nod to Gottlob Frege's concept of sense and reference, identifies three dimensions of literary reference as springboards for hermeneutic methods of re-visioning interpretations where intensive/extensive are not mutually exclusive but could form a continuum. Clustered under three categories of reference, Referenz der Sprache (reference of language), Referenz auf der Schaubühne (reference on the stage), and Kulturelle Referenz (cultural reference), the contributors engage with existent scholarship, new approaches, and with each other. [End Page 615] In the section Referenz der Sprache, Carol Jacobs, Marianne Schuller, Zachary Sng, and Gerhard Neumann offer readings with a focus on the fascinating ending of Kleist's drama, where Penthesilea's words forge a deathly weapon and she then famously kills herself with that dagger created in language. Detailed studies of the drama's rhetoric, particularly its use of metaphors and allegories, offer both rich contexts of rhetorical traditions and close readings that take into account the history of the drama's reception, and new perspectives in the study of rhetoric that attest to the often acclaimed Aktualität of Kleist's texts. The section Referenz der Schaubühne offers contributions by Bettine Menke, Christian Moser, Tim Mehigan, Rüdiger Campe, and Gérard Raulet. Critical attention to this particular aspect of the play developed more recently and reflects the power of the profound irritation Kleist's play spread among his contemporaries and ours. Large sections of the drama replace dramatic action with teichoscopy or messengers' reports, calling attention to the centrality of the theater-specific difference between that which is visibly presented on stage and the invisible off stage that is created in literary language. The contributions to the section on Kulturelle Referenz by Helmut Schneider, Bianca Theisen, Katrin Pahl, and Bernhard Greiner focus on those scenes of the drama where the characters are caught up in their attempts to distinguish friends from enemies in war, which begin the conflation of their desires for loving and killing the other. Interpretations address the constructions of cultural differences from the perspectives of...