Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre Research Articles

Ethik (Ethics)

Does Goethe’s work contain an ethical system? Goethe’s life coincided with the flowering and end of ethics as a philosophical discipline, and his two Wilhelm Meister novels—Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship) and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, oder die Entsagenden (1821/29; Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, or the Renunciants)—constitute a reflection in the position of the individual in the Age of Ethics. In the Lehrjahre, Goethe narrates the travails of the individual in a world no longer secured by the moral cosmology of Christianity, while, in the Wanderjahre, he paints a picture of a fragmented world, dominated by the single value of utility, in which the individual seems scarcely to play any role at all. Each novel contains a sustained engagement with a philosophical ethics—the former, that of Kant and his notion of the Ideal; the latter, that of Spinoza and the relationship between the part and whole—that it seeks not to represent, but rather to adapt as a narrative and hermeneutic practice. In this way, both Wilhelm Meister novels stand, together, as one single plea for an artistic ethics in a world at once administered and disintegrating.

Development, Stasis and Detours in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Great Expectations

Abstract Both Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Great Expectations suggest the possibility of individual growth and formation leading to maturity and fulfilment, but in each case the hero’s development is problematic. Progress is not linear; it is marked by detours and is threatened or undercut by elements of stasis when time – and life – seems to stop, but equally the hero’s development seems to depend on these moments of stasis. In Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre a number of characters close to Wilhelm, primarily female characters, demonstrate an inability or refusal to engage with life that may be associated with sickness, introversion or the inability to manage past trauma – or indeed the transcendence offered by art and beauty. In Great Expectations Pip’s development as a moral person is undercut by his illusion that the deathly Miss Haversham has plans to provide him with the wealth and social status to put him on a level with Estella. His social advancement as ‘a gentleman’ thus hinders his true development as a moral person and produces a temporary moral stasis. Nevertheless, in both novels the female characters associated with stasis play an essential part in setting the hero on a course that promises positive development and self-fulfilment. In the end, though, neither author is entirely able to resolve the tensions within their idea of development, which seems to run counter to the idea of stasis but also, somehow, to require it: correspondingly, the endings of both novels are open and uncertain.

Whose Voice? Speaking, Singing, and Listening in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Cervantes’s Don Quijote

ABSTRACT Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre appeared in 1795–96, two decades after the publication of Bertuch’s translation of Cervantes’ Don Quijote and three years before Tieck’s seminal translation of the same. Both novels famously feature errant protagonists with complex lives and problematic love interests. This comparative paper offers a detailed exploration of the potential links. The initial focus is contextual, with a discussion of Goethe’s reception of Cervantes’s work and the critical responses of Goetheforschung to this meeting of great minds. The paper then explores parallels between the texts, building on the work of Barry Ife on Quijote in relation to the use of voice (especially song) and dissembling (ventriloquy) in the Lehrjahre.

The Making of a Shakespeare Critic: Partial English Translations of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in the Long Nineteenth Century

ABSTRACT Wilhelm’s reflections in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1794/95) significantly influenced the history of Hamlet criticism. The belief that Goethe used his protagonist to present his own analyses was both reflected in and reinforced by partial English translations of the German novel that appeared in British periodicals and anthologies throughout the long nineteenth century. Due to their usefulness for critical discussions, and for British publishers targeting new audiences, Wilhelm’s disquisitions were repeatedly extracted, adapted and remediated by translators and editors who exploited Goethe’s shifting reputation in nineteenth-century Britain. At their hands, pieces of fictional dialogue were reconfigured into autonomous pieces of critical commentary that served specific agendas in the target culture. Building on recent work on remediation, this article analyses both how parts of the novel underwent changes on the textual, paratextual, material and contextual levels, and why translations made them cross the fluid boundary between fiction and literary criticism.

Novalis. Die Poesie des Unendlichen: Dichtungen und Texte des Universalgeistes der Frühromantik ed. by Gabriele Rommel, and: Atlantis: Ein Märchen von Novalis ed. by Gabriele Rommel and Nicholas Saul

Reviewed by: Novalis. Die Poesie des Unendlichen: Dichtungen und Texte des Universalgeistes der Frühromantik ed. by Gabriele Rommel, and: Atlantis: Ein Märchen von Novalis ed. by Gabriele Rommel and Nicholas Saul Dennis F. Mahoney Gabriele Rommel, ed. Novalis. Die Poesie des Unendlichen: Dichtungen und Texte des Universalgeistes der Frühromantik. Wiesbaden: S. Marix, 2022. 271 pp. Gabriele Rommel and Nicholas Saul, eds. Atlantis: Ein Märchen von Novalis. Halle: Coq-Art, 2022. 32 pp., 18 illustrations. Gabriele Rommel, the former director of the Research Center for Early Romanticism / Novalis-Museum at the birthplace of Friedrich von Hardenberg in Schloss Oberwiederstedt, has edited the first volume listed above within a series that hitherto has dealt largely with the writings of twentieth-century authors [End Page 204] such as Hans Fallada, Christian Morgenstern, and Stefan Zweig. Near the beginning of her well-organized introduction, Rommel provides a lengthy quote from Hermann Hesse's enthusiastic reaction to Ernst Heilborn's Novalis edition of 1901 for the hundredth anniversary of the poet's death, which rescued Novalis from decades of neglect. Clearly, Rommel hopes to make similar use of the 250th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich von Hardenberg on May 2, 2022, to encourage readers to (re)acquaint themselves with a writer and thinker who may be only a faint memory from secondary school. For this purpose, she provides an initial overview of Hardenberg's family background, education, and professional training as a lawyer and mining official in Saxony before situating him within the late eighteenth-century developments in politics, philosophy, and the natural sciences that he attempted to integrate and develop within his own writings. Rommel also provides concise introductions and overviews for each of the ensuing four sections: "Vorarbeiten zu verschiedenen Fragmentsammlungen," "Veröffentlichungen im Athenäum und in den Jahrbüchern der Preussischen Monarchie," "Zwei Roman-Projekte," and "Essay." A one-page list of primary and secondary sources concludes the volume. Given this volume's likely intended audience, it might have been better if its initial section, first published in Heilborn's edition from 1901, had either not been included or else listed in the otherwise chronological order of initial printed appearances of Novalis's writings: the Blütenstaub fragments and Glauben und Liebe oder Der König und die Königin in 1798, the Hymnen an die Nacht in 1800, the fragmentary novel projects Die Lehrlinge zu Sais and Heinrich von Ofterdingen in 1802, and the speech from November of 1799, now known as Die Christenheit oder Europa in 1826. First-time readers of Novalis may become discouraged upon encountering complete or partial use of (untranslated) French within roughly 10% of the 105 notes within the so-called "Teplitzer Fragmente" written during Hardenberg's stay at this spa in the summer of 1798 due to his already worsening health. Those readers who do persist in their efforts, however, will be rewarded by encountering Novalis's major poetic, philosophical, and rhetorical works in an attractively produced and reasonably priced paperback volume. For the scholarly community, moreover, Rommel's introduction to the "Vorarbeiten zu verschiedenen Fragmentsammlungen" clarifies their relation to the other works contained in this volume. For example, she quotes from Hardenberg's letter to Friedrich Schlegel on August 20, 1798, that "die Centralmonaden "of his meditations in Teplitz, have been "die Frauen, die xstliche Religion und das gewöhnliche Leben." These three topics make up the entire content of the ensuing "Ergänzungen zu den Teplitzer Fragmenten," which includes a first version of the fairy tale of Hyazinth and Rosenblütchen that plays a key role in Die Lehrlinge zu Sais included later in the volume. In addition, the "Studien zur bildenen Kunst" anticipate the significance of the relationship between antiquity and modernity in the fifth of the Hymnen an die Nacht, while the essay "Über Goethe"—also from the summer of 1798—documents the importance of Goethe for Hardenberg's own efforts to integrate art and science into his literary work. Chapters 1, 3, and 5 from Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Novalis's major attempt at a novel in response to Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96), have the advantage of being self-enclosed units, but...

Rhythmus (Rhythm)

The lexeme Rhythmus has a long history of its own. In the context of Goethe’s thought, it needs to be approached via both his theoretical discussions of the term and his handling of rhythm in his literary work. Goethe conceives of rhythm in terms of its materiality, and its major philosophical opportunity is the intense connection that it offers between subject and object. Goethe’s attitude to meter—that is, rhythm organized for the purposes of poetic production—was ambivalent: although he mastered any number of different verse forms, he remained suspicious of poetic rhythms that were too metronomic. The creative tension of rhythm is an implicit theme in various works and is explored through two examples in this entry: the poem “Der Musensohn” (1774/1800; The Son of the Muses) and the character Mignon from the novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–1796; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship).

Maß (Moderation, Measure)

This entry on Maß (moderation, measure) explores a concept that has not received much attention in Goethe scholarship and makes a case for its usefulness and versatility in tracking how Goethe addresses a philosophical issue with a history stretching at least back to Aristotle’s conception of “the golden mean.” It shows how Goethe’s writings respond to numerous issues connected with the concept of moderation, ranging from the problem of self-moderation, when an individual’s own internal calibration comes in conflict with societal norms, to the more theoretical question of how to define the correct standard of measure (Maßstab). The discussion of moderation in Goethe’s work is, to be sure, coupled with its opposite, namely the potentially deadly threat of immoderation and excess, such as one finds in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther), Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), and Torquato Tasso (1790). Such potential conflicts, which also raise questions of where to position the standard of measure (Maßstab) of behavior, lead naturally into contexts of scientific experimentation, as in Goethe’s essay “Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt” (1792; The Experiment as Mediator of Object and Subject), where such standards take on a different valence from their role in mathematically based natural sciences. In addition, Goethe’s novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809; Elective Affinities), provides a poetic model where conflicts between individually and socially calibrated notions of measure and moderation play out with major ethical consequences. The entry concludes with a reflection on different kinds of aesthetic experience, each with its particular understanding of Maß: the individual’s appreciation of the sublime, the theatrical performance, and the embodiment of the self through poetic meter. Throughout these examples, the entry will underscore the role of narrative constraints: regardless of whether the medium is prose or poetry, one finds that questions of Maß as moderation in Goethe’s writings are often accompanied by questions of narrative control and excess. The following overview and analysis of Maß in Goethe’s writing will show that this term is a nodal point of ethical, epistemological, and aesthetic concerns.

The Paradox of the Obedient Actor

This essay reconsiders the apparent paradox in Goethe’s reverence for the actor’s freedom in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and his demand for actors’ obedience in his ‘Regeln für Schauspieler’. Looking beyond the practical application of the individual ‘Regeln’ and instead reading them collectively as an extension of the Bildungsroman form, it identifies an analogous understanding of the actor as a subject in these works. If Goethe intended the Bildungsroman to educate bourgeois social subjects, in the ‘Regeln’ he sought to educate actors as aesthetic subjects. As much or more than working toward the ‘Verbürgerlichung’ of German theatre and actors, the ‘Regeln’ thus work toward the ‘Ästhetisierung’ of acting and of the actors themselves. Examining the paradox of the obedient actor, the essay shifts perspectives on Goethe’s ‘Regeln für Schauspieler’, and raises questions about how the Bildungsroman and ‘Theaterreform’ related to and impacted modern philosophies of subjecthood and freedom.

ПУТЕШЕСТВИЕ КАК СПОСОБ ДУХОВНОГО И ФИЗИЧЕСКОГО СТАНОВЛЕНИЯ В НЕМЕЦКОЯЗЫЧНОЙ ЛИТЕРАТУРЕ ДЛЯ ЮНОШЕСТВА ПЕРВОЙ ПОЛОВИНЫ XIX В.

The aim of the research is to examine the theme of travelling in the works of German authors of the first half of the 19th century in relation to its didactic orientation to the spiritual and physical improvement of the developing hero. The article examines different motives of the spiritual and physical formation of young heroes, and an important plot constitutive motif of journey. In the novel of upbringing by Johann Wolfgang Goethe (“Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre”, 1796; “Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, oder Die Entsagenden”, 1829), a significant place is given to the idea of transformation and development, which is embodied in the narrative. The heroes of Goethe’s dilogy find their place in life, improving themselves in movement and work. The journey occupies a significant place in the children’s literature of this period (L. Chimani, Ch. Hildebrandt, L. Hölder, J. Meynier, K. Biernatzki), and a few others. The methodology is based on the principles of comparative literary studies. Works from the same period of German literature are compared typologically. Writers working for children and young people pick up and develop the theme of distant wanderings and the discovery of new territories. Robinson becomes a popular hero again. Writers use the genre of robinsonade not only to show the attractiveness of travelling, but also to create an example of raising a physically and spiritually mature hero who is ready to overcome all sorts of obstacles.

Zusammenhang (Nexus)

The lexeme Zusammenhang (nexus) was introduced into philosophy by the German rationalists, who conceived of the world as a multiplicity of independent substances coordinated in a system of pre-established harmony. In his critique of these metaphysicians, Kant insisted that things hang together in not one but two ways—as an aggregate of a posteriorisense data, or as a system of a priori concepts—and that these two nexus are separated by an epistemological chasm. This entry proposes that Goethe’s nexus concept recovers the middle term excluded by Kant’s binary distinction and that this middle term plays a key role in both his scientific and literary writings, including the Hefte zur Morphologie (1817-1824; Notebooks on Morphology), Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-96; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), and Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809; Elective Affinities). By comparing Goethe’s theoretical use of the nexus concept with his literary use of the nexus motif, this entry articulates a relation of part to whole that displays more coherence than a mere aggregate, yet is more dynamic than an absolute system.

Hope in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre: Affect Theory, Potentiality, Mistake and Change

This article reads Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre from the perspective of affect theory and focuses on the two elements of potentiality and mistake in the novel. In addition to its lexical meaning, the concept of affect emphasizes the transmissions of energy and force from body to body and between body and the world in time and space. Affect is intense and full of potential. Wilhelm’s theater project and love affairs are equally filled with intensity and potentiality for the future, which differs from Franco Moretti’s interpretation of Goethe’s novel as a backward-looking conservative work that disavows the French Revolution. Mignon’s death because to heart failure demonstrates the affective end of Wilhelm’s dream to become an artist and a bodily reaction to his turn toward pragmatism. Even though Wilhelm makes grave mistakes during the novel and his theater project in the end fails, which according to Jürgen Habermas reflects the transformation of the public sphere around 1800, Wilhelm is able to change and amend his mistakes and remain flexible and hopeful. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre thus contains a forward-looking vision and reveals hope as a public feeling of the bourgeoisie after the French Revolution.

Eine Tochter Mignons: Nell in Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop

The essay studies the influence of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre on Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop. The relation of Nell and her grandfather, of the latter and his brother, and Nell’s comic counterpoint, the Marchioness, are all inspired by Goethe’s novel. Yet Dickens’s de-aristocratization, desexualization, and re-Christianization represent crucial differences from the German model.

Goethe as chorographer

This essay argues that an unacknowledged, yet powerful relation exists between Goethe’s return to an ambulatory and digressive prose in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and the tradition of chorography. Against the split Hans Blumenberg identified between world-time and life-time and its problematic narrative negotiation in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, I reconstruct the tradition of ancient and early modern cosmography and especially its narrative part, chorography. Initially a kind of narrative Wunderkammer in which an ambulatory narrator explores and recounts the wonders of distant lands, in the age of colonization chorography focused on transmitting those characteristics of landscapes and peoples that disembodied geographical description could not convey. Goethe was familiar with chorographic texts and modes of writing, and several specific chorographic procedures and allusions appear in Wanderjahre. They combine to resist the narrative pull both of his own earlier subjectivism, of Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos, and of the coming industrial novel.

Henry James and The Bildungsroman: Between Convention and Its Alteration

Some of the most important and popular Victorian novels are Bildungsromane, in which authors construct or rather reconstruct their own life experiences as formative processes. To mention just David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, The Mill on the Floss, Marius the Epicurean, and so on. Following its long development history from ancient narratives to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, the Bildungsroman enters as a newly established fictional tradition into Victorian culture and literature through Carlyle’s threefold literary reception of the novel of formation and displays its subsequent flourishing and complexity as a literary system encompassing particular thematic and narrative patterns. In this study, a number of novelistic works by Henry James are scrutinized, and each faces the question as to whether its thematic and narrative perspectives fit the pattern and shape of the Bildungsroman.

The Virginal Mother in German Culture: From Sophie von La Roche and Goethe to Metropolis by Lauren Nossett

Reviewed by: The Virginal Mother in German Culture: From Sophie von La Roche and Goethe to Metropolis by Lauren Nossett Beth Ann Muellner Lauren Nossett. The Virginal Mother in German Culture: From Sophie von La Roche and Goethe to Metropolis. Northwestern UP, 2019. 232 pp. Cloth, $99.95; Paper, $34.95; E-book, $34.95. Lauren Nossett’s well-researched study presents moments of upheaval in German history that become stable in the presence of the fictional virginal mother, offering new emphasis on a ubiquitous figure not yet highlighted in the scholarship of fictional mothers. The idealized virginal mother inhabits the contradictory space between “social expectation and reality” (3), where she glorifies motherhood, fetishizes virginity, and views sex and pregnancy as taboo topics. The fictional virginal mother emerges as changing eighteenth-century discourses of science, religion, and philosophy failed to fully explain human female behavior. Beyond Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influential position on women’s maternal instincts, an attempt to strengthen male control over the female body eluded the scientific community. The virginal mother emerges in the cultural imagination as a solution to her absence in reality. Sophie von La Roche and her epistolary novel Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771; The History of Lady Sophia Sternheim, 1991)— an example of the private, informal, supposedly female genre— provides the first example (22). The novel’s emphasis on the patriarchal order of gender and class is disrupted via the narrator Sophie’s dispersal of pedagogical advice to women. As in each insightful chapter, Nossett begins with brief historical context and author biography, followed with close readings that trace two virginal mother motifs: first, the caregiving and self-sacrificial figure who replaces “bad” mothers (24); and second, the virginal heroine who overcomes “the seduction plot” (27). In chapter 2 the focus is Goethe’s ideal of the nonbiological virginal mother. In Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1779), Lotte’s chaste, maternal care for her siblings differs from the “dangerous maternal body” (53), a theme repeated in unrealistic female characters in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1824) who bolster the virginal mother as feminine ideal. Where the biological female body appears in the figure of Gretchen in Faust I (1808), she proves murderous. Nossett’s excellent reading notwithstanding, Marianne Ehrmann’s (1755–95) infanticide fiction— the only female contemporary of Goethe’s to have written on the topic, as discussed [End Page 125] by Helga Madland in a 1992 Monatshefte article— would be better matched for the female authorship the book otherwise pursues. Chapter 3 considers the virginal mother as a “heroine of pulp fiction” in E. Marlitt’s Das Geheimnis der alten Mamsell (1867; The Old Maid’s Secret, 1871) and Die zweite Frau (1874; The Second Wife, 1887) (75). Amid political upheavals, Marlitt’s virginal mother provides social stability within middle-class domesticity, reinforcing Rousseau. At the same time, her heroines offer slight variations on eighteenth-century romance-driven models: women in Marlitt’s world suffer from vanity rather than adulterous behavior. In chapter 4, evidence of actual caregiving and motherhood in autobiographical texts of Hedwig Dohm, Adelheid Popp, and Ottilie Baader, shift s away from idealized motherhood elsewhere (99). Rare are glimpses of satisfying or idealized maternal labor in Dohm’s middle-class view or Popp’s and Baader’s working-class life stories, where economic, social, and political realities challenge maternal images found in aristocratic or bourgeois fictional worlds. In chapter 5, Thea von Harbou’s screenplay for Metropolis (1927) allows maternal images to overcome destructive patriarchal forces, where biological mothers are portrayed in a positive light (Joh Fredersen’s mother and his wife, Hel, appear in the novel). However, Maria as virginal mother does not exist in a domestic sphere, leaving no opportunity for critique either. Ideal femininity here is redemptive and extends to women as well as feminized men. In conclusion, in her propensity to act chastely and to offer free labor, the idealized, selfless German female caregiver differs from US and British examples. The end of the idealized virginal mother in Germany comes with the Nazi push for utilitarian, biological motherhood. Nossett’s examinations are well...

Grenzerfahrungen: Studien zur Goethes Ästhetik by Mattias Pirholt

 Reviews e final chapter is devoted to three short films—Nueva Argiróplis (), Pescado (), and Muta ()—and their connection to water. Martin makes a powerful case for understanding this in relation to ‘fluid ontologies and becoming, where the formlessness of water is suggestive of an opposition to established forms’ (p. ). e Cinema of Lucrecia Martel is a thoroughly researched and well-written study of one of the most innovative contemporary film-makers. Martin uses film theory, film criticism, interviews, and archival material to develop a detailed and insightful reading of Martel’s œuvre. Her conclusions are drawn from the evidence she presents through close readings of the cinematic texts, and they illuminate many aspects of Martel’s work as an intellectual and film-maker. S C V R Grenzerfahrungen: Studien zur Goethes Ästhetik. By M P. Heidelberg: Winter. .  pp. €. ISBN ––––. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s approach to aesthetics is generally discussed in terms of Autonomieästhetik, which assumes that an aesthetic experience remains isolated from different factors of society and culture, or from the events and undercurrents of an individual’s life. Mattias Pirholt challenges this dominant view in his study, which argues that Goethe’s description of aesthetic experience should be understood within the context of historicity and everyday life. In the introductory part of his study Pirholt goes against the mainstream discussion concerning the nature of Goethe’s aesthetics and lays the foundations for his subsequent argument by drawing upon the philosophical ideas of Hans Georg Gadamer , Hans Robert Jauß, and Reinhart Koselleck. As Pirholt reminds us, Gadamer’s concept of the ‘fusion of horizons’ proposes a different way of understanding the connections between natural sciences and humanities (H. G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, ), p. ). In contrast to the objective and scientific knowledge characteristic of the natural sciences, the Geisteswissenschaen contribute to change in the experiencing person. Jauß draws attention to the double bind in the aesthetic experience: although it is new, productive, and utopian, this experience draws upon the past of an experiencing subject. Pirholt draws attention to such change in terms of both its subject matter and its structure; in order to investigate the latter, he makes use of Koselleck’s categories of experience and expectation . ese concepts expose a movement of dialectics, which eventually shows the historicity of an individual and that of an era. Pirholt focuses on the era of Sattelzeit (c. –) in German cultural history in which the anticipation of the future and the individual’s space of experience became particularly relevant owing to rapid developments taking place in society. He regrets that such a dialectics of horizon and space—which is apparently well known in historical and social sciences—has thus far not reached the discussion about the structure of aesthetic experience: MLR, .,   Weder die analytische Philosophie, noch die Phänomenologie, noch der Pragmatismus bietet aber eine Erklärung der Historizität der Erfahrung, insbesondere der ästhetischen Erfahrung. Sie gehen ausnahmslos von einem modernen, quasi postromantischen Vorverstehen des Wesens der schönen Kunst und der Erfahrung davon aus. Deshalb übersehen sie die geschichtliche Kontextabhängigkeit ihres Gegenstandes, der offensichtlich von sozialen, erzieherischen, ökonomischen, wissenschalichen, technischen, medialen (und weiteren) Faktoren abhängt. (pp. –) Pirholt’s approach to aesthetic experience might appear merely polemical if his introduction were not followed by five insightful, thought-provoking essays about different aspects of aesthetic experience in Goethe’s works. e first chapter, entitled ‘Die Teilung des Raumes: Wandlungen der ästhetischen Erfahrung Goethes’, focuses on the origins of aesthetic experience in some of Goethe’s major works. Here Pirholt discusses the development of Goethe’s aesthetic experience in terms of the space which moves between the world of the arts and that of bourgeois existence. Pirholt considers the original aesthetic experience as a repetitive reflection point, a kind of ‘Urszene’ in the works of an author where it may appear as a path between two worlds. In Goethe’s unfinished Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung (–) the path appears as a possibility for the protagonist to enter the art of theatre, but in his novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (–) the path eventually turns out to be an illusion. Finally...

August Wilhelm Schlegel'Hamlet'-Manuskript: Kritische Ausgabe by Kaltërina Latifi

 Reviews A W S, ‘Hamlet’-Manuskript: Kritische Ausgabe. Ed. by K L. (Germanistische Texte und Studien, ) Hildesheim and New York: Olms. .  pp. €. ISBN ––––. Hamlet was not August Wilhelm Schlegel’s favourite Shakespeare play. at honour went to Romeo and Juliet, the play relegated to the last volume in Johnson–Steevens’s and Malone’s Shakespeare editions as well as in Eschenburg’s translation (and in a late volume in Wieland), but now reinstated as the first play in Shakespeare’s dramatische Werke in . A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which followed, assumed the primary position allotted it by Wieland and Eschenburg (and the English editions that they used) and picked up the challenge offered by their versions. ere was still no Hamlet, but Schlegel, having devoted volume  to Julius Caesar and Twelh Night, finally relented in  with the third volume, but in tandem with e Tempest. ere are two points of note here. e translation of Hamlet, a daunting prospect compared with the relatively compact Romeo and Juliet, could be seen not so much as a personal preference but as a reaction to the already massive reception of this play in Germany: with alone in the s Garve’s essay and notably Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, the young Tieck’s sheaves of (unpublished) notes and Friedrich Schlegel’s significant mention of it in the so-called ‘Studiumsaufsatz ’. Goethe had already had it performed twice in Weimar in this decade and was to use Schlegel’s translation in , since when it has remained the standard version. ere were negotiations with Iffland, the great actor-manager in Berlin, whose interest in a properly rendered Hamlet would provide a breakthrough in the theatre for the otherwise so literature-oriented Romantics. But more precisely, it was Friedrich Schlegel who put pressure on his brother to complete the translation of this so central text, as part of a wider Romantic programme. August Wilhelm had used his opportunistically named Etwas über William Shakespeare bey Gelegenheit Wilhelm Meisters of , which has little of memorable value to say about either Wilhelm Meister or the Prince of Denmark, to set out his translation principles, the centrality and appropriateness of verse rendition, and the dignity and worth of translation itself in the dissemination of classical poetic texts. It did not, however, make him a friend of Hamlet, witness his very guarded remarks in his Vienna Lectures, nor indeed did he translate Macbeth, Othello, or Lear. Most—but not all—of these factors inform Kaltërina Latifi’s ‘Hamlet’-Manuskript and give it its raison d’être. ey raise issues of editorial scholarship, some specific to Schlegel’s Shakespeare, some less so. But first of all to the text itself. Since Michael Bernays’s ground-breaking study of , Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Schlegelschen Shakespeare, it has been known that the Dresden royal, later state, library (now SLUB) held the manuscripts of twelve of Schlegel’s Shakespeare translations, indeed all but five, in various stages of completion or redaction, mostly ‘work in progress’, with the sole exception of Romeo and Juliet, written out in a fair copy in Caroline’s hand. ey have been consulted by relatively few scholars, and only individual pages have been reproduced in studies on Shakespeare in Germany and MLR, .,   on Schlegel’s specific role in that process. Only one play, the earlier version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (), has been edited, by the late Frank Jolles in  and—it needs to be said—following principles different from the ones here under discussion. What is the status of the manuscript which is the subject of this edition? It is neither a first dra nor a final copy for the printer. It has what Rudolph Genée in , quoted here with approval, called a ‘Zwischenstellung’, affording us, as it were, a privileged insight into the translator’s desktop (Rudolph Genée, A. W. Schlegel und Shakespeare (Berlin: Reimer, ), p. ). is also may have involved Caroline, although there is very little sign of it here. What we do have is a diplomatic transcription of the main text of Hamlet in Schlegel’s hand, with the original manuscript reproduced en face. e original...

VERSIONES DE ROUSSEAU: DAS ERDBEBEN IN CHILI O EL “RETORNO A LA NATURALEZA” COMO PALIMPSESTO LITERARIO.

Las fuentes literarias del topico del “retorno a la naturaleza” —celebremente narrado por Heinrich v. Kleist en Das Erdbeben in Chili (1807)— no han sido hasta el momento suficientemente estudiadas. En el siguiente trabajo proponemos dos importantes precedentes filologicos: los B eytrage zur geheimen Geschichte des menschlichen Verstandes und Herzens (1770) de C.M. Wieland y la escena elaborada por Goethe en Capitulo Quinto, Libro IV, de la novela Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795). A partir de estas referencias, Kleist elaborara un abordaje singular de las problematicas intelectuales e ideologicas asociadas a las diferentes versiones del topico que le permitira a su vez llevar adelante una lectura singular de la obra de Rousseau en el contexto posterior a la Revolucion Francesa.

Goethe's Families of the Heart by Susan E. Gustafson

Reviewed by: Goethe's Families of the Heart by Susan E. Gustafson Julie Koser Susan E. Gustafson. Goethe's Families of the Heart. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. 208 pp. In this persuasive new study on family in Goethe's works, Susan Gustafson extends the focus of her award-winning scholarship on male same-sex desire to attend to the multiplicity of affinities and non-exclusive attractions constituting familial configurations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Expanding recent scholarship on gender and sexuality in Goethe's literary corpus, Gustafson foregrounds the varied iterations and diverse constellations of the family manifested in works spanning from 1776 to 1829. The aim of Gustafson's project is to illuminate how "Goethe's literary texts provide a counter discourse to the predominant aristocratic and emerging civil constructions of 'ideal families'" (2) by examining "the multiple ways in which his texts challenge common eighteenth-century notions of family and relationships between women and men, men and men, and women and women" (4). At stake in [End Page 300] Gustafson's critical readings is the claim that Goethe "clearly rejects the norms of his time in defining and accepting all love relationships, and in dismissing the notions of ideal civil or aristocratic families" (5). Through careful analyses, Gustafson's book participates in and successfully deepens Goethe scholarship by offering further insights into Goethe's attitudes and views about gender, sexuality, and kinship. Confining its analysis of Goethe's unconventional families to the novel Die Wahlverwandschaften, the play(s) Stella, and the novels Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, primarily, Goethe's Families of the Heart is organized into four chapters framed by a brief introduction and conclusion. In the introduction, readers are presented a concise summary of the historical, political, and legal definitions of family as they emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. Gustafson positions this important study on kinship within the existing scholarship on Goethe and establishes the theoretical framework for nuanced readings of the family with recourse to Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume I and Lisa M. Diamond's Sexual Fluidity. The first chapter, with its in-depth examination of the changeable and fluid nature of attraction in Die Wahlverwandschaften, functions as a fulcrum for detailed explorations of familial configurations in subsequent chapters. In this foundational chapter, Gustafson persuasively establishes the non-conformist, non-exclusive, and changeable nature of love that permeates the panoply of Goethe's literary families. In chapter two, same-sex relationships between women take center stage in Gustafson's compelling reading of the play Stella. Juxtaposing the two versions of the play's conclusion, the author notes that the drama "presents one of the most daring representations of same-sex desire between women in Goethe's works" (66). This chapter, as well others in which Gustafson exhibits a sustained engagement with elective affinities between women in Goethe's texts, offers perhaps the most innovative and impactful contribution to recent scholarly discussions. The majority of Goethe's Families of the Heart, chapters three and four, is dedicated to the novels Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre respectively, which offers numerous examples of the manifold and arguably unconventional forms of family conceptualized by Goethe. From incestuous attractions, same-sex and heterosexual partnerships, to non-biological, adoptive families, Lehrjahre and Wanderjahre provide Gustafson with the most compelling evidence for her claim that Goethe not only radically redefined notions of family and rejected conformist, conservative definitions of kinship promulgated by the dominant discourses of his time but that such elective affinities "are not only present, not only real, not just acceptable, but (as the Wanderjahre asserts) actually the highest and holiest of feelings that bring relationships and families together" (153). The study's arguments are synthesized succinctly in the book's conclusion which once more articulates the radical and controversial views of family instantiated by Goethe's works that took aim at conservative, restrictive notions of family in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century German-speaking society. Gustafson's concluding remarks affirm the transformative potential of Goethe's characters in their pursuit and consummation of elective affinities: "Goethe's stories confront us with not only the persistent...

Novel Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel, 1795–1830 by Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge, and: Goethe’s Families of the Heart by Susan E. Gustafson

Reviewed by: Novel Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel, 1795–1830 by Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge, and: Goethe’s Families of the Heart by Susan E. Gustafson Heidi Schlipphacke Novel Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel, 1795–1830. By Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2016. Pp. x + 202. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-1571139597. Goethe’s Families of the Heart. By Susan E. Gustafson. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Pp. vii + 199. Cloth $105.60. Paper $39.95. ISBN 978-1501315763. The topics of family and kinship have recently enjoyed a renaissance in German studies in light of new approaches to thinking about the relationship between the family model and the state. The shifting contours of modern familial and marriage paradigms, evident in recent legislation supporting marriage equality for same-sex couples, have surely informed reconsiderations of the nuclear family and its origins in the eighteenth century. In addition, the enhanced visibility of both nonbiological affective communities (adoptive, increasingly international, and even virtual) and purely biological relationships (for example, sperm donor families in which members have no connection beyond the biological) spurs us to rethink assumptions about the simple mapping of the nuclear family onto the (imagined) state in the German Enlightenment. For the past few years the German Studies Association has hosted a “Family and Kinship” network that has provided a highly productive forum for new reflections on the shifting connections between blood ties, economics, and politics in German-speaking countries. Sarah Eldridge’s and Susan Gustafson’s books respond to this call for nuance and reconsideration of the definition and function of “family” in the eighteenth century. Both Eldridge and Gustafson have chaired the “Family and Kinship” network, and each has written a book that intervenes in crucial ways with cutting-edge discussions about the intersection of family, economics, politics, and aesthetics. In Novel Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel, 1795–1830, Eldridge offers a nuanced study of the ways in which the form of the novel mirrors, responds to, and, in turn, helps shape conceptions about family and generation that emerged in the German states around 1800. Gustafson focuses explicitly on seminal works by Goethe: one play (Stella [1775]) and three important novels (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre [1795], [End Page 158] Die Wahlverwandtschaften [1809], and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre [1821]), in order to elegantly show us how anathema these works are to any restrictive notion of love. On the contrary, Gustafson convincingly argues, Goethe’s works are not only nontraditional in their critical representation of nuclear families, they are likewise radically progressive (perhaps more so than our present age) in their consistently positive depiction of nontraditional affective bonds, including same-sex, polyamorous, and adoptive ones. In this sense, Gustafson’s monograph could be seen as a companion to Astrida Tantillo’s Goethe’s Modernisms (2010), in which Tantillo forcefully argues for the presciently modern nature of Goethe’s views on economics, education, and religion. Interestingly, although Eldridge’s work is not focused on Goethe per se, she concludes Novel Affinities with a beautifully astute interpretation of Die Wahlverwandtschaften, drawing out the ways in which it offers a subtle metareflection on the relationship between the genre of the novel and shifting notions of generation and testament—two concepts central to any understanding of the family. Eldridge shows convincingly in clear prose how we must think through the form of the novel together with that of the nuclear family, two “genres,” we might say, that are linked to emerging notions of subjectivity around 1800. Eldridge is particularly sensitive to the ways in which the novel—itself a malleable genre that becomes, as Eldridge argues, reflexive almost the minute it emerges as a dominant literary form—invites its readers to what she calls “imaginative engagement” with its material and form. The novel around 1800, she shows quite elegantly, is a literary genre that is not only concerned with the interior development of its protagonists but also with conceptions of generation and testament that are at the core of the bourgeois subject’s understanding of him/herself in the early nineteenth century. What is more, precisely by focusing on generation and testament, two concepts that link the...