In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

216 Book Reviews shoulder" (333), or when the fact that Goethe first had intercourse with a woman fairly late in his ltfe is explained by the statement that Goethe "simply could not puU the trigger, even when the target moved obUgingly right Ui front of him" (352), an editor should have saved the author. And the unfortunate tradition of referring to men with thetf last and women with their first names, so that Schelling, SchiUer, and Goethe faU Ui love with various Carolines, Charlottes, and Christianes, should be retired as weU. University of Nevada, Reno Horst Lange NOTES 1. A possible opening for developing an alternative view to that of Richards without denying his evidence may be offered by the fact that Darwin uses the term "machinery of IUe" in The Origin of Species. Richards acknowledges the passage, but sees it as an aberration because Darwin uses the term while describing an ecosystem as emphatically seU-regulatory i.e., as having a feature which for Richards is alien to a machine. It should be pointed out, however, that the epitome of the modern machine, James Watt's steam engine, contains a setf-regulatory mechanism. Without the latter, the engine would blow up, and therefore it could be said that a steam engine exhibits that kind of equilibrium which characterizes Darwin's ecosystem. To put it differently, there might be a fundamental imprecision in Richards' use of the term mechanism. Peter Brandes, Goethes .'Faust': Poetik der Gabe und Selbstreflexion der Dichtung. Paderborn: Fink, 2003.298 pp. What gives? Peter Brandes's Goethes 'Faust': Poetik der Gabe und Selbstreflexion der Dichtung reminds us that this is, not least, a literary question . In particular, Brandes makes the case that the categories of gift-giving and givenness are of special relevance to a text Ui which poetry both flaunts its profligacy ("BUi die Verschwendung, bin die Poesie" [1.5573]), and tightfistedly withholds any key to its own enigmas. As his subtitle suggests, Brandes is not primarily interested in the gift as a theme of Goethe's drama, although this too plays a role in his analysis. Rather, he looks at several distinct ways Ui which the text foregrounds a "poetics of the gift" as constitutive of its own mode of operation. His study is organized as a "return to the text" (23), a philologicaUy focused set of "excursions" (11) arranged to provide in the end "ein Ensemble der Bedeutungsmöglichkeiten der poetischen Gabe, wie es sich aus dem Text heraus artikuliert" (26). The "gut" functions here as a metapoetic category, one that Brandes draws from Marcel Mauss and Derrida, and from the literarily oriented treatments of the concept by Sigrid Weigel and Ulla Haselstein. In investigating its applicabUity to Goethe's Faust, moreover, Brandes develops a discussion of the economics of language developed among such readers of the play as Heinz Schlaffer, Jens Kruse, Hans Christoph Binswanger, Jean Starobinski, Werner Hamacher, and Jochen Hörisch (Marc SheU belongs in this list as well, although his work goes unmentioned in Brandes's otherwise extensively researched project). The study begins with a reading of the drama's Zueignung, inquiring into the play of giving and receiving, ownership (Aneignung) and dispossession (Enteignung) that informs these opening lines. To whom is the Dedication being made? Who—if anyone—may lay claim to those shadowy figures Goethe Yearbook 217 (schwankende Gestalten) whom the poet has apparently let slip from his grasp once before? As Brandes argues, these shapes manifest themselves with the autonomy of mémoire involontaire, of a return of the repressed. With this return, however, comes the consciousness of another kind of loss. The stanzas mourn the death of poetry as an orally transmitted art form (42). In a dawning age of mechanical reproduction, the Aeolian harp to which the poet compares his "lispelnd Lied" (J. 28) no longer resonates with the motions of a poetic setf so much as it signals that this self has been displaced. What is most proper (eigen) to poetic language are its own formal qualities; here, it does not present itself as the instrument of an authorial agent whom it might serve as a medium of expression. The notion that Goethe...

pdf

Share