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Eighteenth-Century Studies 36.3 (2003) 459-463



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Goethe's Place in Contemporary Criticism

Daniel Purdy
Pennsylvania State University


Klaus Berghahn and Jost Hermand, eds. Goethe in German-Jewish Culture(Rochester: Camden House, 2001). Pp. 190. $55.00 cloth.
Paul Bishop, ed. A Companion to Goethe's Faust: Parts I and II(Rochester: Camden House, 2001). Pp. 319. $80.00 cloth.
Nicholas Boyle and John Guthrie, eds. Goethe and the English-Speaking World: Essays from the Cambridge Symposium for His 250th Anniversary(Rochester: Camden House, 2002). Pp. 300. $70.00 cloth.

David E. Wellbery. The Specular Moment: Goethe's Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). Pp. 492. $70.00 cloth. $22.00 paper.

The two hundred fiftieth anniversary of Goethe's birth in 1999 was celebrated throughout German Studies departments as an occasion for conferences on the author and his relevance for the late twentieth century. These retrospective accounts of Goethe's importance were by no means always congratulatory. Because they brought together scholars from all corners of German Studies, more than a few of these gatherings took the opportunity to critically examine Goethe's legendary status. A few years later, one can now say that the less inclined a conference or anthology was to celebrate, the more meaningful its contributions were likely to be.

Indeed, the most significant study on Goethe under discussion here appeared well before the anniversary, and its importance will last well beyond. David Wellbery's The Specular Moment: Goethe's Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism is a remarkable study in theoretically informed readings of eighteenth century poetry. Eighteenth-century studies in German literature, as well as in English, have tended to shy away from modern theory. The eighteenth century has been seen for too long as a haven from technical jargon. Contrary to this trend, Wellbery mobilizes a vast critical apparatus drawn from formalism, narratology, Lacanian psychoanalysis and Foucaultian discourse analysis with fluidity and grace. He never loses sight of the literary object of his analysis, he never [End Page 459] engages in lengthy summaries of theories. Critical terms are shown to have emerged from literary texts themselves. Wellbery wants the reader to understand that Goethe's early poetry marks a fundamental shift in the discourse of subjectivity, and his argument integrates twentieth-century terminology into his close readings, confirming the impression that many of his critical concepts were "already there" in Goethe. In Wellbery's hands, the absence of overt scholarly rehashing of Jacques Lacan, Jurij Lotman or Roman Jakobson comes across as theoretical understatement, an economical approach in which the application of theory to a literary text is the primary interest.

Wellbery distinguishes his approach to Goethe's early lyric from the scholarly tendency to read poems as moments in the biography of the author. According to this biographical conceit, a poem is brought on by an occasion in the life of the poet; to understand the poem one must know the life of the poet. This approach of course has not been confined to Goethe scholarship; commentaries on Wordsworth are but one obvious parallel. With both Wordsworth and Goethe, the biographical approach was encouraged by the author's work. Goethe, the great proponent of Bildung (education of the self), described his works, and those of most every author he admired, as signs of how creative genius unfolds. Whether he was reading Shakespeare, viewing a cathedral, or the Sistine chapel, Goethe perceived art as an expression of personal character. This approach has of course been reinforced in the two centuries following Goethe's first publications, so that biographical references are by now an implicit layer of any Goethe commentary. The conferences and publications celebrating the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of Goethe's birth are testimony to the persistence of this tradition.

Wellbery insists that his book does not partake in this biographical tradition because he takes a discourse analytical approach to Goethe's lyric. His goal is to demonstrate how Goethe's lyric opens up a new possibility for poetic enunciation, one distinctly different from the idyllic...

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