Die modernen Ordnungen des Wissens von der Liebe entstehen zwischen Romantik und Realismus.
Die Studie geht der Neuordnung des Gefühlswissens auf der Epochenschwelle in einem Querschnitt durch die ...Literatur um 1830 nach. Anhand von Lektüren der frühen Lyrik Heinrich Heines, der Prosaschriften des Jungen Deutschland und der Dramen Georg Büchners fragt sie nach den ästhetischen Formen, den sozialen Einsätzen und vor allem den wissenshistorischen Anschlüssen, in denen sich die Umgestaltung der Passionen poetisch manifestiert. Damit erweitert sie die Literatur- und die Kulturgeschichte der Liebe um eine wesentliche Station.
Heinrich Heine has long been recognized as an early admirer of Goethe's Divan. In Die romantische Schule, he issues an enthusiastic endorsement that helped popularize Goethe's late poetry in the ...French-speaking world, and in his own poetic production, above all in Buch der Lieder, he repeatedly orients himself eastwards in terms of settings and designs. This article considers the language of flowers in Traumbilder I, the allegorical resonances of the Orient in the famous 'Fichtenbaum' poem, and the mirroring of Goethe's Hafiz in the concluding poems of Nordsee II, 'Fragen', 'Der Phönix', and 'Im Hafen'. Throughout the cycles of his collection, Heine embarks on West-Eastern voyages after Goethe.
The article considers Goethe's engagement with the doctrines of Franz Joseph Gall, the founder of phrenology. Using the sketch of their first face-to-face meeting in the Tag- und Jahreshefte of 1805 ...as a guide, it argues that Goethe views phrenology through the lens of his scientific methodology and reshapes it accordingly, when needed. In particular, he seeks to render Gall's account of the skull as the brain's imprint into a phenomenon worthy of extensive observation and description but still open to interpretation. Moreover, Goethe immediately relates Gall's anatomical structuring of the brain to the concept of metamorphosis, thus paving the way to integrating organology into his morphology. On occasion, Goethe also succumbs to the allure of the skull that craniology has created, such as when he agrees to give material self-evidence in the form of a face mask.
The writer, scientist, philosopher, and radical democrat Georg Büchner (1813-1837) occupies a unique place in the cultural legacy of the German-speaking countries. Born into an epoch of inevitable, ...yet arrested historical transition, Büchner produced a small but exceptionally rich body of work. This collection of essays in English and in German considers the full spectrum of his writings, the political pamphlet Der Hessische Landbote, the dramas Danton's Tod, Leonce und Lena, Woyzeck, and the fragmentary narrative Lenz, as well as the letters, the philosophical lectures on Descartes and Spinoza, and the scientific texts. The essays examine connections between these works, study texts in detail, debate ways of editing them, and trace their reception in contemporary literature and film. The novel readings presented here not only celebrate Büchner on the eve of his bicentenary birthday but also insert this untimely figure into discussions of the revolution-restoration dynamic and realism in poetics and politics.
The writings of Niklas Luhmann, the towering architect of modern systems theory, abound with references to the literature of early German Romanticism. Starting from this observation, the article ...investigates the relevance of certain Romantic ideas for the formation of Luhmann’s theory. Transcending categories of influence and commentary, it argues that literature does not anticipate theory in this case, nor does theory flesh out blind spots in literary texts. Rather, it suggests that systems theory repeatedly turns to Romanticism in order to perfect its tools and sharpen its concepts, increasing in complexity with each encounter. It is precisely this potential for interruption and growth that Luhmann sees and values in the early Romantics and that makes them privileged partners in his ongoing attempt to add new pillars to the grand edifice of his social theory.
To be sure, the task of reconsidering the relations between systems theory and early Romanticism could take different routes and the article outlines some of these in a roadmap for alternative inquiries. A second aside, included in the article, addresses a potentially misleading case of homonymy – the notion of system. When the Romantics speak of ›system‹, often with some degree of reservation, they engage critically as well as poetically with the philosophy of German Idealism. Luhmann, by contrast, finds his models elsewhere and thus tends to circumvent this particular tradition.
Nonetheless, in the ongoing endeavor of theory building, Romanticism seems to offer just the right kind of balance between affinity and resistance to systems theory to qualify as (what Luhmann considers the highest form of compliment) an irritation. Without a strong dose of Romanticism, one might say, systems theory would neither ›see‹ the world by way of observation, nor recognize the resilience of communication (even in the face of incomprehensibility), nor fully acknowledge the systemic processes of creating autonomy by way of autopoiesis.
With Romanticism, Luhmann claims, art begins to reflect on its autonomy. Now fully liberated from serving religious purposes or teaching moral lessons, art commences anew. It becomes markedly and decidedly self-reflexive. Though it shares this feature with all functional systems, there is something special in the self-reflexivity, which constitutes the autonomy of art – the rejection of all determinations coming from the outside. Modern art presents nothing but art and it draws radical attention to this fact. Romantic irony, doublings, and a penchant for negotiating writing as the medium of literature, all perform this feat. Through such devices, Romanticism playfully showcases the autonomy of art and, by extension, the autopoiesis of art as social system. Looking at the way Romanticism treats and establishes autonomy deepens the theoretical insights into the workings of autopoiesis.
Luhmann also credits Romanticism with exploring the boundaries of communication. He reads Romantic texts as staging prolonged experiments with self-sabotaging communications, be they reduplication, indeterminacy, oscillation, or incommunicability. While testing the limits of communication, Romanticism cannot help but demonstrate how unshakably robust the concept is – for communication can indeed communicate all of the above and still not fall apart. Since even outlandish communication fails to bring about its own end, the Romantics serve as a test case for a larger point Luhmann likes making: communication is the foundation of all social systems and as such, always continues, no matter what. Having been vetted in this way, his theory stands, as Luhmann notes with much delight.
What Literary Studies consider as fiction, systems theory describes as a particular model of observation. Romanticism with its fairy tale universes, dream-like parallel spheres, unlikely encounters and split characters, offers contingent, ever-changing and always advancing observations. It thus brings to light that which is otherwise confined to the background – the world as it appears and as it potentially could be. In so doing, Romanticism makes the world, however fleetingly, noticeable for both the occasional reader as well as the astute theorist.
Conversely, to Luhmann’s infatuation, the Romantics seem to have found in him exactly the kind of reader they always dreamed of – someone who transitions effortlessly from reader to critic, and who renews the textual tradition upon which he draws, unlocking the potential of texts as he endows them with new and unexpected meanings, while also deepening his own critical insights through the challenges they pose. Luhmann himself might either have been conscious of this connection or appalled by the suggestion, but in the intellectual encounters he sought and created throughout his works, the foremost theorist of social systems lets himself be profoundly irritated by the writers of early German Romanticism.
Between 1791 and 1793, Goethe became increasingly concerned with the upheaval unfolding to the West of Weimar, responding to it with a series of plays, Der Groß-Cophta, Die Aufgeregten, and Der ...Bürgergeneral, which transpose the revolution to rural Germany and transform it into comedy. Contemporary audiences as well as modern critics have by-and-large shunned the plays. This article makes a case for a reassessment, arguing that the comedies may be provincial in setting, schematic in script, and minimalistic in cast but pointedly identify the imagination as the primary force pressing for political change. Goethe's comedies of the revolution respond to this constellation by dethreefold—nouncing revolutionary fantasies as a scam created by demagogues to fool the gullible; by exposing the theatricality inherent in the revolutionary undertaking; and by branding the apostles of liberty as tyrants in waiting. As Goethe, in each play, pits the lord of the land against a contender, he not only catalogues the sources of sovereign authority but also establishes a disturbing parallel between the sovereign and the con-artist, thus pointing to the foundation of sovereignty in fiction.
KAFKA'S LITERARY COMMUNITIES Fortmann, Patrick
The Modern language review,
10/2009, Letnik:
104, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In the winter of 1911–12 Franz Kafka developed a programmatic concept of community against the backdrop of a double frame, formed, on the one hand, by Martin Buber's Cultural Zionism and Itzhak ...Löwy's Jewish folk culture and, on the other, by the opposing outlooks of Max Brod and Karl Kraus on German-Jewish literature. Kafka responded to these encounters with two sets of texts, each constructing community by way of literature, as a community based on the circulation of writing in the 'Schema für kleinere Litteraturen' as well as a community resting on performance and speech in the 'Einleitungsvortrag über Jargon'.
