Project MUSE®: Goethe Yearbook - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Goethe Yearbook.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1982) through current issue
Latest Articles: Goethe YearbookTWOProject MUSE®Goethe Yearbook1940-90870734-3329Latest articles in Goethe Yearbook. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editors’ Preface
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930200
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This 31st volume of the Goethe Yearbook is also our first as coeditors of the journal, and we are grateful to the previous editorial team, Patricia Simpson and Birgit Tautz, as well as all the preceding editors of the journal, for maintaining the tradition of quality scholarship in the field while publishing innovative work that touches on questions of contemporary interest and relevance. We are writing this preface at a time of transition, as the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be loosening its grip and in-person teaching, lectures, and conferences have been restored to something resembling pre-pandemic formats. At the same time, our personal and professional lives have been transformed by the events of the past
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallEditors’ Preface2024-06-19text/htmlen-USEditors’ Preface2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®65862026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19The End of the Affair: Goethe’s Gretchen “Roman”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930201
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Books 5 and 6 of Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth) tell the story of Goethe’s first love. He is fourteen, and she several years older. Gretchen is her name, and she lives with relatives in Frankfurt. The action takes place from late 1763 to mid-1764 and is as charming as anything Goethe ever wrote. Ernst Beutler, in his notes on the autobiography, describes the inn-like setting in which the story unfolds: “How tender this love, how portrait-like, how meticulous, how vivid, as if sketched by a painter, these nocturnal interiors with wine and coffee, conversation, languidness, slumber.”1 But who was Gretchen, anyway? No Gretchen is mentioned in Goethe’s outline of the autobiographical project,2 and archival
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallThe End of the Affair: Goethe’s Gretchen “Roman”2024-06-19text/htmlen-USThe End of the Affair: Goethe’s Gretchen “Roman”2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®1019322026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19The (Un)Problematic Ground of Reality: The Goethe-Hegel Auseinandersetzung on and through Ǧalāl al-Dīn Rūmī
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930202
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It is well known that in his imaginary journey to the East Goethe found a privileged interlocutor in the celebrated poet from Shīrāz, Shamsu al-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ. What is less known, however, is that in the interpretative framework of the West-östlicher Divan (West-Eastern Divan) Ḥāfeẓ is implicitly opposed to another Persian poet, much less appreciated by Goethe: Ǧalāl al-Dīn Rūmī. While Ḥāfeẓ witnesses an experience of the inextricable God-Nature nexus very close to his own, Rūmī is seen by Goethe as an abstruse mystic preaching an unacceptable elevation above the sensible world.In the decade following the publication of the Divan, the figures of Ḥāfeẓ and Rūmī, extensively studied by German scholars at the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallThe (Un)Problematic Ground of Reality: The Goethe-Hegel Auseinandersetzung on and through Ǧalāl al-Dīn Rūmī2024-06-19text/htmlen-USThe (Un)Problematic Ground of Reality: The Goethe-Hegel Auseinandersetzung on and through Ǧalāl al-Dīn Rūmī2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®1170122026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19Iphigenie in der DDR. Jochen Bergs Im Taurerland als Mythenkorrektur von Goethes Iphigenie auf Tauris
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930203
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Jochen Bergs Drama Im Taurerland, das 1978 in der DDR erstveröffentlicht wurde, ist heute weitgehend unbekannt.1 Auf den Spielplänen deutschsprachiger Theaterbühnen sucht man das Werk, das im Westdeutschland der 1980er-Jahre als “Geheimtipp”2 gehandelt und durchaus erfolgreich inszeniert wurde, vergeblich und auch die Literaturwissenschaft ignoriert die Tetralogie—laut Mirjam Meuser das “Hauptwerk” (Elend 289) Bergs—weitgehend. So teilt Im Taurerland vor dem historischen Kontext seiner Entstehung einerseits das Schicksal vieler Werke von Autorinnen und Autoren aus der DDR, die nach der Wende als unzeitgemäß betrachtet wurden,3 und wird andererseits für die Aufnahme in den retrospektiv zusammengestellten Kanon der
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallIphigenie in der DDR. Jochen Bergs Im Taurerland als Mythenkorrektur von Goethes Iphigenie auf Tauris2024-06-19text/htmlen-USIphigenie in der DDR. Jochen Bergs Im Taurerland als Mythenkorrektur von Goethes Iphigenie auf Tauris2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®1239022026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19Eichendorff’s Echoes: Sound and Transience in the Romantic Era
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930204
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Although Theodor Adorno might seem to be an unlikely admirer of the late Romantic writer Joseph von Eichendorff, in 1957 the critical theorist penned a lecture on Eichendorff’s lyric poetry that was broadcast on West German radio. Adorno’s lecture was one of the many scholarly contributions produced that year to commemorate the centennial anniversary of Eichendorff’s death.1 Despite the poet’s conservative tendencies and his proclivity for recycling the clichés and stock images of Romantic writing, Adorno draws out a “modern element in Eichendorff, which has only now become accessible.”2 In other words, while some continue to see in Eichendorff’s lyric poetry little more than a sentimental portrayal of Germany’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallEichendorff’s Echoes: Sound and Transience in the Romantic Era2024-06-19text/htmlen-USEichendorff’s Echoes: Sound and Transience in the Romantic Era2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®879982026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19Race, Imperialism, and German Intellectual History: Reflections Toward a Rethinking of the Canon
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930205
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How do scholarship on the age of Goethe and scholarship on the topics of race and imperialism interact? If we, as scholars of eighteenthand nineteenth-century German culture, approach this question with any candor, we must openly acknowledge that, until very recently, our field quite decidedly had little to do with these connections. Conversely, scholars specialized in race and imperialism have seldom focused attention on Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment Germany. That disconnection is slowly disappearing, however, and exploration of the points of intersection between these areas of inquiry is what the Goethe Society of North America’s Race & Imperialism reading group has been dedicated to. Now in our fourth
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallRace, Imperialism, and German Intellectual History: Reflections Toward a Rethinking of the Canon2024-06-19text/htmlen-USRace, Imperialism, and German Intellectual History: Reflections Toward a Rethinking of the Canon2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®371842026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19“Race” as an Enlightenment Problem
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930206
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From being virtually nonexistent in scholarship on German literature and culture, the term “race” has become not only a key concept in studies on the Enlightenment but has also caused a fair amount of uproar and controversy. Much of this development happened over the past two decades. My generation of eighteenth-century studies scholars—I received my PhD in 1994—grew up with a concept of “Enlightenment” that was certainly problematized and disputed but simultaneously nevertheless also considered normative (as contested as that normativity at times may have been). To me, “race” offers an interesting way of (re)conceptualizing what the Enlightenment in its various forms is and stands for. The term “race” and its
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmall“Race” as an Enlightenment Problem2024-06-19text/htmlen-US“Race” as an Enlightenment Problem2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®431872026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19By Land or by Sea: German Orientalism, Colonialism, and Racism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930207
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Eighteenth-century Germanists, and perhaps Goethe scholars even more so, have long felt themselves exempted from addressing the horrors of industrialized modernity: capitalist exploitation, colonialism, world wars, Nazism, and the Holocaust. Their safe haven should not, however, be dismissed as mere escapism, for it remains one of the central paradoxes of German history that the Goethezeit produced many of the values that, with modification, brought forth the first critiques of modernity. Many twentieth-century references to aesthetic autonomy, barbarism, humanity, or cosmopolitanism to name but a few such shared terms, have been passed down from the eighteenth century. The philosophical repudiation of modern
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallBy Land or by Sea: German Orientalism, Colonialism, and Racism2024-06-19text/htmlen-USBy Land or by Sea: German Orientalism, Colonialism, and Racism2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®402902026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19Kant’s Four Examples: On South Sea Islanders, Tahitians, and Other Cautionary Tales for the Case of “Rusting Talents”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930208
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It is a remarkable thing to find oneself suddenly surprised by an author after having spent years analyzing, interpreting, and teaching their works. And yet, that is precisely the experience of many Kant specialists in recent times, as greater attention than ever has been placed on Kant’s discussions of gender and race. Part of the disorientation for Kantians surely comes from the way in which these investigations—oriented as they are by questions of empire as opposed to say, metaphysics—are able to make a body of work that has been long-familiar seem strange and new. It is in this vein that I want to use my discussion here as an opportunity to reconsider one of Kant’s most familiar texts, Grundlegung zur
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallKant’s Four Examples: On South Sea Islanders, Tahitians, and Other Cautionary Tales for the Case of “Rusting Talents”2024-06-19text/htmlen-USKant’s Four Examples: On South Sea Islanders, Tahitians, and Other Cautionary Tales for the Case of “Rusting Talents”2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®654812026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19Rediscovering Kant as a Reader: The Early Physical Geography Lectures
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930209
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i take much of my experience as a reader of Kant to be typical of twenty- first-century historians of philosophy. As an undergraduate, I was introduced to Kant as the culminating author in a course on the history of early modern philosophy, which presented the analysis of synthetic a priori judgments in the Prolegomena as the lynchpin of his resolution of the debates between British empiricists and continental rationalists. During my time as a graduate student and journeyman professor, I reveled in the details of the historical record this potted history obscured. I realized that Kant was not just responding to Descartes and Hume, but Crusius, Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, and others. I came slowly to appreciate the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallRediscovering Kant as a Reader: The Early Physical Geography Lectures2024-06-19text/htmlen-USRediscovering Kant as a Reader: The Early Physical Geography Lectures2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®401532026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19Kant’s Race Theory, Kleist, and Disciplinary Boundaries
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930210
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Race theory became a hot topic during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the German-speaking lands. The context of the arguments about it included discussions of new philosophies of science, some modeled after Newtonian physics, and a new discipline called “anthropology” formed out of ideas regarding how science could be applied to the study of humans in an increasingly globalized environment. Remarkable scientific breakthroughs had encouraged a posture of dominant invulnerability and a lack of empathy driven by race theory’s foundation of material instrumentalism.1 Immanuel Kant’s skin color–based race theory illustrated these weaknesses while being topical in discussions about the new science
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallKant’s Race Theory, Kleist, and Disciplinary Boundaries2024-06-19text/htmlen-USKant’s Race Theory, Kleist, and Disciplinary Boundaries2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®393712026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19Poetry of Empire: “Der Wilde,” Indenture, and Indigeneity around 1800
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930211
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In her 1921 dissertation, Georgina Rose Simpson, the first Black woman to earn a PhD in the United States, at the University of Chicago, explores Herder’s understanding of “das Volk” in a cultural and philosophical context that celebrated the primacy of proximity to the natural world. Arguing from a linguistic, etymological, and philosophical perspective, Simpson acknowledges ambivalence in concepts of primitive peoples in the eighteenth century; they were depicted as both uncorrupted by civilization and overdetermined by otherness: “This primitivism whether in the entire race or in a special portion is always eulogized. These primitive specimens have the most pronounced racial individuality because civilization
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallPoetry of Empire: “Der Wilde,” Indenture, and Indigeneity around 18002024-06-19text/htmlen-USPoetry of Empire: “Der Wilde,” Indenture, and Indigeneity around 18002024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®383222026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19Goethe’s Faust and Sorge in the Age of Imperialism and Colonialism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930212
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In eighteenth-century studies, and in German studies more broadly, much recent scholarship has been dedicated to reevaluating the intersections between prominent thinkers and colonialism and imperialism. Overlooked in that fruitful endeavor, though with a few notable exceptions, has been one of the most prominent figures in German literary history, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In this contribution, I hope to remedy that oversight by showing that Goethe’s Faust is a work particularly relevant for discussions of imperialism and colonialism in German life in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. My argument centers on Goethe’s critical depiction of colonial and imperial violence through the murders of Baucis
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallGoethe’s Faust and Sorge in the Age of Imperialism and Colonialism2024-06-19text/htmlen-USGoethe’s Faust and Sorge in the Age of Imperialism and Colonialism2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®276492026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19Die Kunst zu sehen. Johann Heinrich Meyer und die Bildpraktiken des Klassizismus by Johannes Rößler (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930213
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For anyone who has studied Goethe’s post-Italian years, Johann Heinrich Meyer (1760–1832) has been an ever-present background figure: consultant, coeditor, coauthor, resident expert, project director, advisor. He spent more than half of his seventy-two-year life in Weimar, where he was involved in various architectural and interior design projects (including Goethe’s living quarters in the house on the Frauenplan). He directed the ducal drawing school and was an advisor in matters aesthetic to the ducal family. His artistic hand left its mark on publications, medallions, and gravestones. Few had such frequent and intense contact with Goethe. In Johannes Rößler’s meticulously researched and beautifully illustrated
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallDie Kunst zu sehen. Johann Heinrich Meyer und die Bildpraktiken des Klassizismus by Johannes Rößler (review)2024-06-19text/htmlen-USDie Kunst zu sehen. Johann Heinrich Meyer und die Bildpraktiken des Klassizismus by Johannes Rößler (review)2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®115792026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19Vormärz-Handbuch ed. by Norbert Otto Eke (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930214
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The Vormärz-Handbuch is a milestone of literary scholarship on the German nineteenth century, marking the most comprehensive intervention in the period of roughly 1815–48 since Friedrich Sengle’s formidable three-volume study (completed in 1980): Biedermeierzeit. Deutsche Literatur im Spannungsfeld zwischen Restauration und Revolution, 1815–1848. As the handbook’s title implies, its focus is primarily on the literature as well as the social and political forces that could be seen as precipitating the March 1848 revolution in the German Confederation. It therefore presents less of a “field of tension” (Spannungsfeld) between post-Napoleonic restoration forces and revolution than Sengle. Nevertheless, Norbert Otto
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallVormärz-Handbuch ed. by Norbert Otto Eke (review)2024-06-19text/htmlen-USVormärz-Handbuch ed. by Norbert Otto Eke (review)2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®82212026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19Motherless Creations: Fictions of Artificial Life, 1650–1890 by Wendy C. Nielsen (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930215
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“Motherless creations” is a term of Nielsen’s own invention, and names the dual purpose of exploring maternal absences in fictions that feature artificial life and the capacity of fiction to be a vessel for creating and reflecting on these motherless beings. The monograph’s highly compelling, comparative project links with astonishing clarity texts of British, French, German, and American origin, and provides a lineage of transhumanist visions executed through the creation of artificial humanoids without a mother or ex-utero, otherwise termed “anthropomorphic Alife,” in fiction from 1650 to 1890. Nielsen’s selection of literary case studies, featuring Pygmalion’s statue, homunculi, automata, steam men, and others
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallMotherless Creations: Fictions of Artificial Life, 1650–1890 by Wendy C. Nielsen (review)2024-06-19text/htmlen-USMotherless Creations: Fictions of Artificial Life, 1650–1890 by Wendy C. Nielsen (review)2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®105242026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19Politics and Truth in Hölderlin: Hyperion and the Choreographic Project of Modernity by Anthony Curtis Adler (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930216
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It is difficult to say in what way Hölderlin’s Hyperion is political. Though Hyperion participates in a Greek revolt, there is hardly any mention of the Ottoman occupation. When discussing Greece’s political future, Hyperion and Alabanda seem more concerned with the reception of the hero than with independent rule. There is, in general, far more talk about nature, beauty, and the meaning of human life than about political realities. If Hölderlin’s Hyperion is indeed a political novel, it is surely not politics in the conventional sense that is at stake.Anthony Adler’s insightful and original monograph Politics and Truth in Hölderlin aims to supply an understanding of politics that would make a resolutely political
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallPolitics and Truth in Hölderlin: Hyperion and the Choreographic Project of Modernity by Anthony Curtis Adler (review)2024-06-19text/htmlen-USPolitics and Truth in Hölderlin: Hyperion and the Choreographic Project of Modernity by Anthony Curtis Adler (review)2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®100662026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19Optische Auftritte. Marktszenen in der medialen Konkurrenz von Journal-, Almanachs- und Bücherliteratur by Stephanie Gleißner, Mirela Husić, Nicola Kaminski, and Volker Mergenthaler (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930217
<p></p>
The second, collaboratively authored volume of, at last count, six impressive books to have emerged from the DFG research group on German Journalliteratur based in Bochum—“Optische Auftritte”—brings to vivid life the market competition among books, Unterhaltungsblätter, almanacs, and gift books from the first boom of serial literary publications around 1800 to the ebbing appeal of such works by midcentury. By that late phase, August Wilhelm Schlegel’s comments on the Taschenbuch in his Flaxman essay of 1799 appeared to have come home to roost: Schlegel had disparaged its small format, “unpoetic” genre illustrations, and a seeming disconnection between text and image in its pages. (Of course, at this time engravings
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallOptische Auftritte. Marktszenen in der medialen Konkurrenz von Journal-, Almanachs- und Bücherliteratur by Stephanie Gleißner, Mirela Husić, Nicola Kaminski, and Volker Mergenthaler (review)2024-06-19text/htmlen-USOptische Auftritte. Marktszenen in der medialen Konkurrenz von Journal-, Almanachs- und Bücherliteratur by Stephanie Gleißner, Mirela Husić, Nicola Kaminski, and Volker Mergenthaler (review)2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®83462026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19Kleines Buch zu Goethes Iphigenie auf Tauris. Zum Lesen—Zum Spielen by Ulrich Klingmann (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930218
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The modest title of this slim book is needlessly misleading. True, it is a “kleines Buch”—a mere 61 pages. Yet as its subtitle alludes, a twofold impetus inspired Ulrich Klingmann to construct an Iphigenie text that is “zum Lesen” and “zum Spielen.” The initial plan was to create a long overdue German libretto that will, one hopes, inspire a contemporary composer to supply a musical setting worthy of Goethe’s drama. Aware of the tendency to discount librettos as a mediocre literary genre, Klingmann opts to fashion a text based entirely on Goethe’s sublime drama. Though it is not obvious from the title, albeit hinted at in fine print on the front cover, Klingmann significantly enhances the book’s value by providing
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallKleines Buch zu Goethes Iphigenie auf Tauris. Zum Lesen—Zum Spielen by Ulrich Klingmann (review)2024-06-19text/htmlen-USKleines Buch zu Goethes Iphigenie auf Tauris. Zum Lesen—Zum Spielen by Ulrich Klingmann (review)2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®84172026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19Das Handwerk der Literatur. Eine Geschichte der Moderne 1775–1950 by Michael Bies (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930219
<p></p>
Die Geschichte der neueren Moderne bietet vor allem geisteswissenschaftlichen Disziplinen wie denen der Geschichtswissenschaft, Philosophie, Kulturgeschichte, Medienwissenschaft oder eben auch der Literaturwissenschaft immer wieder eine dankbare Herausforderung, die “Moderne” aus neuen Perspektiven analytisch in eine neue Geschichte zu kleiden. Und entsprechend sollte man Michael Bies’ Untertitel als sein zentrales Erkenntnisinteresse auch verstehen: als eine Geschichte der Moderne, wobei man den Nachdruck sowohl auf den unbestimmten Artikel als stellvertretend für mögliche Herangehensweisen auslegen sollte, als auch auf das semantisch multiple Nomen Geschichte im Sinne eines Narrativs, dessen viele Elemente zu
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallDas Handwerk der Literatur. Eine Geschichte der Moderne 1775–1950 by Michael Bies (review)2024-06-19text/htmlen-USDas Handwerk der Literatur. Eine Geschichte der Moderne 1775–1950 by Michael Bies (review)2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®107922026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19Aus dem Leben der Form: Studien zum Nachleben von Goethes Morphologie in der Theoriebildung des 20. Jahrhunderts by Eva Axer et al (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930220
<p></p>
The volume Aus dem Leben der Form—not to be confused with coauthor Eva Geulen’s 2016 monograph of the same name—brings together nine essays that examine resonances of Goethean morphology across a range of disciplines in the twentieth century. The book deploys a twofold approach to illuminate the legacy of Goethe’s morphological thought. It does so, first, by examining a broad selection of authors whose thought, in some way, reflects a morphological mode of inquiry. Thus, some contributions in this collection are primarily philological. Michael Bies’s chapter, for instance, carefully documents Goethe’s understated presence in the thought of Claude Lévi-Strauss, while Ross Shields reconstructs the paradoxical
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallAus dem Leben der Form: Studien zum Nachleben von Goethes Morphologie in der Theoriebildung des 20. Jahrhunderts by Eva Axer et al (review)2024-06-19text/htmlen-USAus dem Leben der Form: Studien zum Nachleben von Goethes Morphologie in der Theoriebildung des 20. Jahrhunderts by Eva Axer et al (review)2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®87262026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19Goethe Medial. Aspekte einer vieldeutigen Beziehung ed. by Margit Wyder, Barbara Naumann, and Georges Felten (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930221
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“All is medium,” one could declare, adapting the aperçu Goethe used to characterize his insight into the metamorphosis of plants: “All is leaf.” Like the transforming organ in the process of metamorphosis, the medium itself cannot be observed per se but only described in terms of its transformative effects. Similarly, Goethe’s work has inspired an ongoing tradition of reception and been transformed in this process. Applying another famous dictum, this time by Marshall McLuhan, the messages Goethe emitted have become the medium “Goethe.” It therefore is a valid task to consider the specific media types and strategies Goethe himself, his posthumous editors, and his apologists have employed to convey and inevitably
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallGoethe Medial. Aspekte einer vieldeutigen Beziehung ed. by Margit Wyder, Barbara Naumann, and Georges Felten (review)2024-06-19text/htmlen-USGoethe Medial. Aspekte einer vieldeutigen Beziehung ed. by Margit Wyder, Barbara Naumann, and Georges Felten (review)2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®109872026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19Goethe in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Enlightened Solutions for a Modern Hubris by Malte Ebach (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930222
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With the release of AI tools like ChatGPT in early 2023, endless attention has been dedicated to discerning how artificial intelligence will impact all areas of human endeavor, from the economy to misinformation to war. In academic spaces, the conversation has tended to center on its practical uses in research, a concern primarily for the STEM and STEM-adjacent fields. How, for example, will AI supplement and improve existing research methods, speeding up the processing of big data sets in the hopes of unlocking new pieces of knowledge ahead of rival research teams? Discussion has also been dedicated to the problem of its misuse. Will students use software to complete their homework assignments? For that matter
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallGoethe in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Enlightened Solutions for a Modern Hubris by Malte Ebach (review)2024-06-19text/htmlen-USGoethe in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Enlightened Solutions for a Modern Hubris by Malte Ebach (review)2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®88972026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19Karoline von Günderrode: Philosophical Romantic by Joanna Raisbeck (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930223
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Karoline von Günderrode’s distinctive poetic voice, short life (1780–1806), and tragic death have made her a figure of fascination. A biographical lens—often employed to assess and frequently diminish female authorship—dominated Günderrode’s reception by her contemporaries, whether they were discomfited by female intellectual ambition or celebrated her writing within the framework of female friendship, as in Bettina von Arnim’s influential novel Die Günderode (1840). Over a century later, Christa Wolf likewise probed Günderrode’s literary work in conjunction with her biographical circumstances in her fiction Kein Ort. Nirgends and her edition and consequential reading of Günderrode’s work in Die Schatten eines
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallKaroline von Günderrode: Philosophical Romantic by Joanna Raisbeck (review)2024-06-19text/htmlen-USKaroline von Günderrode: Philosophical Romantic by Joanna Raisbeck (review)2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®101942026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19Seeing Colour: A Journey through Goethe’s World of Colour by Nora Löbe, Matthias Rang, and Troy Vine (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930224
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This exceptionally attractive and intelligent volume is an outgrowth of the exhibition catalogue Experiment Farbe, originally composed by Nora Löbe, Matthias Rang, and Johannes Kühl to celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Goethe’s Farbenlehre in 2010. The catalogue was revised for an exhibition at Ruskin Mill Trust’s Glasshouse College in Stourbridge, England in 2018. The present volume was in turn published as an extensive revision of that publication.Seeing Colour should be viewed in that context. It is, like most exhibition catalogues, written with the educated general reader in mind, and it offers stimulating text with beautiful photographs and plates. It might not be altogether unfair
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallSeeing Colour: A Journey through Goethe’s World of Colour by Nora Löbe, Matthias Rang, and Troy Vine (review)2024-06-19text/htmlen-USSeeing Colour: A Journey through Goethe’s World of Colour by Nora Löbe, Matthias Rang, and Troy Vine (review)2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®82192026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19Johann Heinrich Ramberg. Wielands Oberon. Kommentar ed. by Peter-Henning Haischer and Alexander Rosenbaum, and: Johann Heinrich Ramberg. Wielands Oberon. Faksimile ed. by Frank Zöllner (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/930225
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As I turn to these two publications, the author, pedagogue, and philosopher Christoph Martin Wieland is getting unusual attention in German Feuilletons because of the hot-off-the-press new, monumental biography by literary scholar and social scientist Jan Philipp Reemtsma—Christoph Martin Wieland: Die Erfindung der modernen deutschen Literatur— which has been nominated for several literary awards. Throughout his career, Reemtsma has promoted research and sponsored publications on this neglected author. Reemtsma’s subtitle calls Wieland no less than “the founder of modern German literature.” Goethe would have agreed, as he praised him in Dichtung und Wahrheit as the most important portal to the renewal of German
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/411/image/coversmallJohann Heinrich Ramberg. Wielands Oberon. Kommentar ed. by Peter-Henning Haischer and Alexander Rosenbaum, and: Johann Heinrich Ramberg. Wielands Oberon. Faksimile ed. by Frank Zöllner (review)2024-06-19text/htmlen-USJohann Heinrich Ramberg. Wielands Oberon. Kommentar ed. by Peter-Henning Haischer and Alexander Rosenbaum, and: Johann Heinrich Ramberg. Wielands Oberon. Faksimile ed. by Frank Zöllner (review)2024-06-192024TWOProject MUSE®94652026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002024-06-19