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Goethe Yearbook 217 universal genius — everything but the fact that readers around the worfd still find his works of compelling interest. Thus the book is deeply ambivalent toward Goethe. Sengle wants to read him literally, and to focus exclusively, or at least largely, on his concern with the real. Whenever possible he avoids Goethe's idealism, formalism, and commitment to aesthetic autonomy. He does not want to see, in other words, what connects Goethe to the Romantics, and devotes two essays to equivocations on Goethe's relation to them. Not surprisingly, Sengle finds nothing more misguided or more pernicious than the idea of an "Age of Goethe" as advocated by the great scholars of Geistesgeschichte. While I do not have much use for Korff myself, I prefer to use period designations that encompass afl the writere of the period; hence I follow normal Anglo-American usage and refer to Goethe as a Romantic. Since this term is unacceptable to Sengle largely for reasons of cuttural politics in Germany during his formative and mature years, there seems little point in taking issue with such a deep-seated motivation. One can, however, take issue with Sengle's readiness to buy into the very terminology he attacks. The discourse of Geistesgeschichte was liable to extreme political abuse because it was imprecise and consistently reified. If Sengle were not so ready to believe in Classicism and Romanticism, Enlightenment and Biedermeier, Aristokratismus and Bürgerlichkeit as concrete entities, he would not have to begin the Restoration in the 1790s (136). He repeatedly praises Goethe for his opposition to "-isms" of all sorts, but his own book abounds with the very ones promulgated by the anathematized Geistesgeschichtler. There is, finally, something touching and profoundly significant in this inconsistency. Sengfe appears in this book as a man of strong and decent political convictions. He is sensitive to the enormous difficulty of freeing Goethe from the tangles of his reception, and feels a moral compulsion to rebel against the Goethe myth promulgated by his teachers before the war and against any revival of it. At the same time, he cannot free himself from its power or from its discourse. This book documents the tragic quagmire any responsible German writing about Goethe must still negotiate. University of Washington Jane K Brown Bennett, Benjamin, Goethe's Theory of Poetry: "Faust" and the Regeneration of Language. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986. Benjamin Bennett treats Faust as the immensely complicated rehearsal of Goethe's philosophical anthropology. According to Bennett, the essence of poetry is to reveal "a world-originating 'power' in all language" (17)· Over time, however, poetry increasingly asserts its revelatory power as privileged, and cultural communities experience expectations for literature that can no longer be fulfilled. Hence, poetry also "periodically arrives at crises" (16). These existen tial crises, Bennett asserts, can only be overcome by provisionally defeating "the ironic process" (16) that defines the poetic tradition. But such defeats finally also occasion redemptive reversals. Thus, in the "antipoetic" 218 Book Reviews Faust Goethe's collective audience comes to the crucial recognition that "its excessive demands on poetry are in truth already fulfilled even by common language, and poetry, for both the producer and the recipient, is restored as a possibility" (16). For Bennett, Goethe's Faust — "in its own way a work of literary theory" (232) — exemplifies this efficacy of the antipoetic. As a project on the margins of literature, which traditionally anchors its epistemology in the individual's ironic consciousness of truth, Faust repeatedly demonstrates "the unavailability of an adequate individual point of view from which [it] can be understood" (290). Its "sibylline" text, which "says too much" (291), does not, therefore, constitute "a work of poetry, at least in Goethe's underetanding of the term" (290). By refusing to be silent, it in fact occupies every possibfe individual standpoint through which a reader might achieve a detached perspective to judge it: "The point is thatFaust does not make the characteristic poetic gesture of rounding itself off and leaving us alone to think about it. It makes, rather, the gesture of attempting to swallow us up" (292). Unlike poetry, which produces its meanings by ironically undercutting any...

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