Reading Goethe: A Critical Introduction to the Literary Work (review)

266 Book Reviews aufzufassen. So überrascht es auch nicht, dass sich Carus dann wohl doch eher mit den Romantikern verstand und sich dem Dichter Ludwig Tieck und seit 1824 dessen Literatursalon anschloss und sich tief in die Werke des NovaUs vertiefte. Gleichzeitig pflegte er aber auch mit dem Prinz Johann von Sachsen und der Dante Akademie Beziehungen. Es bleibt offen, wie der Abstand zwischen Carus und Goethe, den anscheinend zunächst Goethe aUem um sich schuf, doch noch genauer Ui Hinsicht auf Carus und dessen Entwicklung zu bestimmen wäre und dies bleibt nun, so wie vieles andere Ui diesem aufschlussreichen Band, eine Sache künftiger Interpretationen. Dazu gehören auch die Kommentare des Carus zur Farbenlehre Goethes, ein spannendes Thema. Hiermit ist schon ein wichtiger Beitrag zur Forschung geleistet. Purdue University Beate Allert Martin Swales and Erika Swales, Reading Goethe: A Critical Introduction to the Literary Work. Rochester: Camden House, 2002. Lx + 186 pp. Recent EngUsh-language works on Goethe—by Nicholas Boyle, Irmgard Wagner, and T. J. Reed—have sought to make Goethe modern, contemporary (while John R. WUliams aimed to make Goethe accessible to contemporary moderns). But whatever the claims of these authors concerning Goethe's relevance , Goethe still emerges from their studies as a person immersed Ui his time, encased m a vast apparatus of historical, poUtical, cultural information that encompasses Leibniz and Spinoza, an earthquake Ui Lisbon and neoclassicism Ui Leipzig, the French Revolution, Napoleon, the categorical imperative, Ovid and Hafis, Rome, and Marienbad. None, certainly, has gone as far as have Martin Swales and Erika Swales who, in Reading Goethe: A Critical Introduction to the Literary Work, manage to discuss much of Goethe's work without reference to the man himsetf, the age in which he Uved, the Uterary context, or, in the case of at least one poem, the coUection Ui which it origUiaUy appeared. The authors confront these omissions Ui the Introduction, after a three and one-haft page account of the "Ufe," an adequate summary (it might have been better rendered as a chronology at the start of the book), but one that saUs past proper names without indicating theft importance or significance: Herder, Free City, Pietism, Weimar Classicism, and so on. On the question of the relation of the Ufe to the creative achievement, the Swaleses confess that "it is not easy to know how to interpret Goethe's biography" (5). They touch on Goethe's problematic status as icon, especiaUy the Goethe who has been "exploited, sanitized, bowdlerized or otherwise distorted" among German biographers. EngUshlanguage biographers of Goethe, m contrast, do not come with this "sociocultural loading," but even English writers—e.g., Boyle, Reed, Barker Faftley— whUe not resorting to a crude testing of the work against the Ufe, also find that Goethe's Ufe "matters profoundly" and that the "Ufe is present in and a guarantor of the creative work." This emphasis on the person of Goethe is at odds with "post-modern notions of textuaUty," which "assert [ ] the death of the author and hold[ ] that the birth of the reader-text dialogue is the only true locus of Uterary signification" (9). The Swaleses wiU attempt to carve out a position that is neither one nor the other but that draws on these two approaches. Goethe's literary work "has a voice which, at every turn, is Ui dialogue with us." This is not the voice of an "elusive pan-textuaUty," but of a "human entity . . . that is inseparable from the forms and modes of its Uved experience" (9)· In turn, the work is worth studying because it "powerfuUy and cogently explores the thematics and styUstics of Goethe Yearbook 267 our (as it were) post-modern condition" (19). That condition, not specificaUy defined , would seem to refer to Ufe in a post-theological world. As the authors say, " Goethe was consistently skeptical Ui matters of religious beUef, " but of greater importance was his "sense of attachment to the earth and aU that it stood for (and aU that stood on it)." Possessing what they refer to as a "worldly faith," Goethe "was fascinated by his own selfhood; but that self was not a sohpsisticaUy secure possession, it...