Anthropologie der Goethezeit: Studien zur Literatur und Wissensgeschichte by Michael Titzmann (review)

This well-edited volume contains selected essays by Michael Titzmann written between 1979 and 2008 and an excellent introduction. To Titzmann’s understanding, literature stores and distributes socially communicable anthropological knowledge that generates a given culture’s self-image (5). Drawing upon the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michel Foucault’s disquisitions on discursive Praxis, Michael Titzmann reconstitutes the concept of a literary epoch as a social-cultural (anthropological) construct which, he believes, can be explained quantitatively. The coeditors, Wolfgang Lukas and Claus-Michael Ort, provide a cogent summary of Titzmann’s methodology: Titzmann “öffnet die ‘strukturale Textanalyse’ vielmehr von Anfang an für Fragen nach dem von Literatur generierten, repräsentierten oder vorausgesetzten ‘kulturellen Wissen,’ stellt Michel Foucaults Projekt einer ‘Archäologie des Wissens’ auf eine textanalytische Grundlage und greift Positionen seiner Diskurstheorie auf, um sie literaturwissenschaftlich zu nutzen und methodologisch zu präzisieren” (27). The author focuses on the systematic ordering of narrative structures and discursive practices, the components of which form histories of particular occurrences (Ereignisgeschichten). To be sure, Titzmann’s structural history of literature displaces conventional forms of literary history: “. . . die grundsätzliche Annahme relativer Systematizität für jede Zeiteinheit ist notwendige Prämisse der Annahme und Beschreibung eines literarhistorischen Wandels” (60). Titzmann is far more interested in the shifts that occur at a particular time in a given space (Wandel) than changes over time. Literaturwissenschaft is here comprehended as a synchronic-historical anthropology.

In retrospect, Titzmann’s primary concern is the synchronic ordering of literary phenomena at particular points in time. Any given system of literature (Literatursystem) possesses a superordinate structure that emerges from an invariance (symmetry) of individual (literary-narrative) phenomena (40).

The coeditors, Wolfgang Lukas and Michael Ort, have divided into five parts the essays Titzmann wrote between 1979 and 2000 and another one in 2008. One of the strengths of the volume is that each section concludes with a list of primary and theoretical texts, literary works, and secondary literature. These lists should spark original research on many other aspects of the eighteenth century. In Part I, Titzmann presents his theory of literary-historical periodization. Part II (“Diskurse der Aufklärung”) is comprised of three thought-provoking essays on 1. Jung Stilling’s Theorie der Geisterkunde, 2. Wieland’s Staatsromane in the context of early modern utopian thinking, and 3. Klinger’s political-historical novels in relation to Late Enlightenment philosophy. The body of literature that called into question mythical and occult directions and both Aberglauben and Unglauben exemplifies Titzmann’s method. In Part III Titzmann introduces a new model of literature, the Initiationsgeschichte, which, among other things, redefines Erziehungs- and Bildungsromane. This section contains essays on knowledge and language in the Goethezeit, practices of secret societies and their transformation in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister Lehrjahre (with another helpful list of primary literatures), the “Bildungs”-/Initiationsgeschichte and System der Altersklassen in the anthropological discourse of the epoch, and semiotic text analysis and historical anthropology on the example of Eichendorff’s Das Marmorbild.

Titzmann’s claims that literary and theoretical texts of a given epoch explicitly thematize the possibility and conditions of a body of knowledge (“Wissen”; 174). All social contacts of, and between texts are ordered by fundamental structures and categories of thought of which the following is the first rule: “Keine Größe, die vorhanden und relevant ist, darf verloren gehen und aus der dargestellten, literarischen bzw. gedachten, theoretischen Welt einfach eliminiert werden” (175).

The essays that comprise Part IV of the volume, “Zur Diskursgeschichte der ‘Gefühle,’” should be of interest to many interpreters of literature. For me, the most interesting article in this section is titled, “‘Empfindung’ und ‘Leidenschaft’: Strukturen, Kontexte, Transformationen der Affektivität/Emotionalität der Goethezeit und ihrer Funktionen im Denksystem der Epoche,” which gives considerable attention to the work of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (333–71). This discussion...