Johann Gottfried Herder: Language, History, and the Enlightenment edited by Wulf Koepke (review)

Book Reviews93 full of condemnation, there's finally more wringing of hands than of necks. Literature's death, we are told, "has to be understood not as a culpable act but as part of a broad cultural change" (209). However much he may dislike these cheinges, Alvin Kernan ceinnot unilaterally construct alternatives. It's not even clear that eis a social constructionist he can oppose them. The displacement of the old literature by the new, the ascendancy of post-mod fiction, TV, and composition studies is simply the displacement of a less plausible set of practices by a more plausible set. And so it goes. JOHN RAMAGE Arizona State University WULF KOEPKE, ed. Johann Gottfried Herder: Language, History, and the Enlightenment. Columbia: Camden House, 1990. 292 p. WulfKoepke is the editor oftwo earlier collections of essays on Herder and is edso the author ofthe Twayne World Authors Series volume on this writer, which appeared in 1987. In the preface ofthe book under review here, we learn that all this research activity should, it is hoped, serve as preliminaries to the founding ofan International Herder Society and that a yearbook is already in preparation for 1991. The present volume consists of 17 studies of necessarily unequal quality. The shortest is 10 pages long, and the longest, 42. Each deeds with some aspect of Herder's writings, personedity, or influence, and more are concerned with language or linguistic problems than with any other topic. Four are written in German, and each ofthese is followed by a briefabstract (lees than one page), probably eis a courtesy to those readers with little or no German. A bit ofcareful editing would have lent clarity to the interesting introduction, whose author is not identified. Limitations of space prevent my discussing more than a few of these essays. In "Herder's Essayistic Style," James Van Der Laan finds not only that "Johann Gottfried Herder figures prominently in the history and development of the German essay," but edso that "the essayistic mode of expression constitutes a large part of his vast literary output. In fact, it seems to be his preferred medium" (108). The tentative, indefinite, equivocal, undogmatic, inductive, and stochastic tredts ofessay writing, he finds, distinguish Herder's prose. Herder also experimented with grammar, diction, and syntax, and steadfastly opposed the Kanzlei-und Paragraphenstil found in many of the learned treatises of his time. "Herder's style is unorthodox and ebullient, conversational, and idiosyncratic" (112). Van Der Laan offers examples from Herder's Kritische Wälder, Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele, emd Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit. He also finds a "pervasive fragmentation" in Herder's prose, pointing out that the sentences "are typically partial and incomplete. Sentence fragmentsphrases , interjections, and exclamations—characterize and punctuate his compositions" (114-15). Herder often includes the reader's participation in his 94Rocky Mountain Review writing by employing the pronoun wir, and his "pieces come to true and final conclusion only in the minds of the readers as they eifterward reflect on and contemplate the issues he raised" (117). Herder's Journal meiner Reise im Jahre 1769 is the subject of Richard Critchfield's study. "That Herder himself came from a pietistic background has no little bearing on salient passages of his diary," for in order to engage "in the introspective scrutiny ofreligious feelings" (98-99) or to keep a record of religious conversion, German pietists cultivated this litereiry genre. But Herder's work purports to be a travel diary, which, for the most part, it is not, for few ofhis observations made during the passage from Riga to Nantes appear here, and he did not begin to write this diary until two months after he had arrived in France. It is actually confessional in nature in that he regrets how he has spent his time in the past, and for his future he plans a more active life and speaks of his plans for a school reform in Riga. He now intends to study French, Greek, and Latin. Journal meiner Reise, Critchfield says, "gives us a fairly accurate portrait of Herder at the age of twenty-five" (100). In "The Experience Denied: Herder Abroad...