Simon Richter & Richard Block 
Goethe’s Ghosts [PDF ebook] 
Reading and the Persistence of Literature

New essays from leading Goethe scholars providing testimony to the continuing, even renewed, relevance of Goethe for literary studies today.






Invoking Goethe’s 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 ghosts’ – 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 ofthe 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. 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 inwriters as diverse as Hegel, Adorno, Benn, Droste-Hülshoff, and Nietzsche. Each of the essays testifies to the enduring salience and presence of Goethe.


Contributors: Helmut Ammerlahn, Benjamin Bennett, Dieter Borchmeyer, Franz-Josef Deiters, Richard T. Gray, Martha B. Helfer, Meredith Lee, Clark Muenzer, Andrew Piper, Jürgen Schröder, Peter J. Schwartz, Patricia Anne Simpson, Robert Deam Tobin, David E. 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.

İçerik tablosu

Introduction-Ghosts and the Machine: Reading with Jane Brown

Egologies: Goethe, Entoptics, and the Instruments of Writing Life

Goethe’s Haunted Architectural Idea

‘Über allen Gipfeln’: The Poem as Hieroglyph

Goethe’s
Hauskapelle and Sacred Choral Music

From Haunting Visions to Revealing (Self-)Reflections: The Goethean Hero between Subject and Object

Mephisto or the Spirit of Laughter

Shipwreck with Spectators: Ideologies of Observation in Goethe’s
Faust II

Constructing the Nation:
Volk,
Kulturnation, and Eros in
Faust

Gretchen’s Ghosts: Goethe, Adorno, and the Literature of Refuge

‘I’ll burn my books!’: Faust(s), Magic, Media

The Imagination of Freedom: Goethe and Hegel as Contemporaries

Effacement vs. Exposure of the Poetic Act: Philosophy and Literature as Producers of ‘History’ (Hegel vs. Goethe)

Toward an Environmental Aesthetics: Depicting Nature in the Age of Goethe

‘Ein heimlich Ding’: The Self as Object in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff

‘Ja, Goethe über alles und immer!’: Benn’s ‘Double Life’ in His Letters to F. W. Oelze (1932-56)

Bibliography of Jane K. Brown’s Publications

Notes on the Contributors

Index