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Eighteenth-Century Studies 36.2 (2003) 299-304



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Goethe at War:
An Invisible School of Thinkers vs. The Industry

Richard Block


Benjamin Bennett. Goethe as Woman: The Undoing of Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University, 2001). Pp. 274. $34.95.

Astride Orle Tantillo. Goethe's Elective Affinities and the Critics (Rochester and Suffolk: Camden House, 2001). Pp. 241. $65.00.

Martin Swales and Erika Swales. Reading Goethe: A Critical Introduction to the Literary Work (Rochester and Suffolk: Camden House, 2002). Pp. 176. $59.00.

Goethe and his work are nothing if not resilient. No matter how divergent strategies for reading may be, they all seem to require, in the case of German [End Page 299] studies, an engagement with Goethe. The three books in discussion here, all of which should be added to shelves already cramped with Goethe studies, illustrate this curious phenomenon. On the one hand, it is not surprising that critics, such as the Swales, continue to exalt Goethe as a man for all seasons whose insights into the modern human condition transcend time and place. Goethe has long been unassailable for those who read or look to an author for an awareness of how to "live thoughtfully, and by that token fully, in the world of common experience" (166). On the other, it seems unlikely that an author who for so long has accommodated that perspective would entertain in equally convincing manner the radical concerns of one like Benjamin Bennett who promotes "an anti-aesthetic initiative" as an antidote to the "wrongness of literature" (254). If the Swales read Goethe for his vigorous affirmation of the living process (165) and thus his ability to impart such an awareness to his readers, Bennett reads Goethe for precisely the opposite reason, for his ability to preclude the "reader's constitutive participation" (254). While Bennett's formulation of his strategy for reading Goethe is certainly a product of recent theoretical considerations throughout the field, Astride Orle Tantillo's book demonstrates that, apart from a relatively short interval in the nineteenth century in which Goethe was largely ignored, radical and conservative figures alike have found something crucially sympathetic to their own positions in Goethe's writings. None of this may be all that new, insofar as any student of German studies has long been aware that thinkers as divergent as Georg Lukács and Friedrich Gundolf all had a friend in Goethe. What is remarkable, and may never be fully explained however fully documented it is, is how the same work can be enlisted in projects that have no shared ideological affiliation and seem to pre-empt the possibilities of reading Goethe in precisely the manner embraced by the next generation or by a different "school" of Goethe scholars. What these three books thus demonstrate is not merely the continued proliferation of works on and about Goethe, but also the configuration that this dynamic has assumed. One is tempted to say that they offer a map of the field today: in the one camp are the Swales, who update, modify, and to some extent re-invigorate the tradition with little or no attention paid to the upheaval that has rocked Goethe studies in the wake of literary theory and gender studies. In the other is Bennett who adeptly reads, among others, Irigaray and Kristeva, to embrace reading Goethe. Tantillo's work tells us that the form or forum of a Goethe polemic, so to speak, may be historically conditioned, but the polemic is old hat; its continued reappearance in different guises merely testifies to the staying power of his work. Such a mundane conclusion, and it is not one that should be attributed to Tantillo, hardly does justice to the explosive, and, I dare say, revolutionary possibilities for reading Goethe that Bennett offers. The question posed above about the ease with which Goethe can be appropriated by virtually any critical school thus acquires a new dimension, which, if we are to read with Tantillo, is nothing new in Goethe studies; someone with something quite new to say says it once...

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