Goethe 2000: Intercultural Readings of his Work (review)

Goethe Yearbook 421 Paul Bishop and R. H. Stephenson, eds., Goethe 2000: Intercultural Readings of his Work. Leeds: Northern University Press, 2000. 193 pp. It would have been a delight to have been a fly on the wall in Glasgow in March 1999 in order to eavesdrop on the lively proceedings of the Goethe celebration there. The next best thing is to read the book, even without the dialogue and scholarly give-and-take that are the ineproducible essence of such colloquia. It is refreshing, for instance, to see Goethe—this all-too-German provincial , whose favorite designation, conversely, was "cosmopolitan"—from an international and comparative perspective. It is enlightening to see a range of global topics covered from Brahma over Kabbalah to German-Chinese anniversaries . And it is lovely to hold in one's hands a book treated with such editorial and aesthetic care by its editors: Witness, as just the most obvious example, the reproduction on the cover of Michael Mathias Prechtl's Der Naturforscher J. W. Goethe im Farbenkreis. But just what is meant by "intercultural"? Gordon A. Burgess ventures the most outright, yet most limited definition of intercultural practice: a refusal to interpret "by any narrow reference to time or place or specific events" (14546 ). To me that sounds suspiciously like retrograde motion: a close (or closed) or hermeneutic reading with a passport. Yet it is clear from the methodology of Paul Bishop's "intercultural glance" at the "Chinesisch-Deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten" that "intercultural" attempts a reformulation of the concept Weltliteratur in theoretical terms: a synthesis of semiotics, the aesthetics of science, and an "encounter between different cultures" (88). And in terms of postmodernist space, the "intercultural" undoubtedly provides a virtual chat room with plenty of corners for scholars to rub elbows. In fact, the essays collected here (eight in English, two in German) represent six loosely defined, loosely related stages in the development of what began as comparative literature in the American academy in the 30s under Wellek and Warren . A number of contributions here are warhorses that still meet that original charge of intellectual history and of aesthetic relationships going beyond nationalism : Andrew Fineron's study of the genesis of Paria; Shona M. Allan's empirical reading of analogies between Goethe and Byron; the capstone lecture on Ernst Cassirer, delivered peripherally to the colloquium by John Michael Krois. A second category, theory, is keynoted by David Wellbery's semiotic discussion of origins in the young Goethe, and supplemented by Patricia D. Zecervic's feminist reading of the Kabbalah and Wilhelm Meister. Burgess's reading of Die natürliche Tochter strikes me as straightforward Germanistik, despite his intention of reading Goethe 's relative silence on the French Revolution. Two hybrids of comparative literature , revisionism and speculative history, provide fireworks: In the best tradition of Eliot influencing Shakespeare, Alberto Destro rewrites Goethe as a decadent in the image of Huysman; Werner Schwan gives a nuanced, theatrical twist to the old what-if? question, "War Weimar ein Irrtum Goethes?" (128). Finally, Bishop's paper is a splendid microcosm of cultural studies, which is the all-encompassing category of which the intercultural is a subset, not necessarily a link or connection. And a conservative subset at that. A nod at what's missing—in terms of geography , in terms of issues, in terms of methods—is indicative, even indicting. There 422 Book Reviews is no Africa or Latin America (barely any NAFTA at all) in this Glasgowian Goethe. If Goethe has an economic or political impact—or if postcolonial smdies have any use for Goethe—you would not know it from the view from Glasgow. But let me not allow who is not there and what is not said to spoil the delight in what can be overheard here. In one corner of this intercultural room (on the other side of the room from the theorists), Feneron would be reminding Schwan that when Goethe looks East (toward the India of Paria), he really has his eye on the Old German of the Hildebrandtslied and, tellingly, the Reformation (44). Schwan would counter that it was really Goethe, not Tom Stoppard, who in Wilhelm Meister wrote the original script...