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Goethe's Talking Books: Print Culture and the Problem of Literary Orality
- Edited by Patricia Anne Simpson, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Birgit Tautz, Bowdoin College, Maine, Sean Franzel, University of Missouri, Columbia
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- Book:
- Goethe Yearbook 28
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 15 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 15 June 2021, pp 315-322
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Summary
OVER THE PAST TWO DECADES, there has been an upswing in scholarship on literary orality in the long eighteenth century, focusing in particular on the recitation and declamation of poetry. Much of this research takes as its starting point the reassessment of the “ear” and a related concern with the “tones” of language in Herder and Klopstock's poetics. In an analysis of Klopstock's 1774 Gelehrtenrepublik (The Republic of Letters), Karl-Heinz Göttert summarizes this shift:
Nicht das—aufklärerische—Auge, sondern das Ohr wird das entscheidende Organ der sinnlichen Wahrnehmung, und nicht auf die “körperliche” Unterstützung der Sprache z.B. durch hohe oder tiefe Stimmlage kommt es an, sondern der Ton hat ein eigenes Leben, deren Zeichenhaftigkeit gerade keinen Regeln folgt.
Not the—Enlightened—eye, but rather the ear becomes the decisive organ of sensual perception; at stake here is not the “physical” supporting of language, for example, by pitching the voice high or low, but rather tone has its own life, whose semiotic character does not follow any rules.
As Göttert and others have shown, the revaluation of the ear in the eighteenth century was by no means limited to poetological theory, but also provided the impetus for a wide spectrum of acoustic performance and composition practices, which, in turn, inspired thousands of pages of commentary in instructional handbooks, journals, and correspondences. In his 2004 monograph Ins Ohr geschrieben. Lyrik als akustische Kunst von 1750 bis 1800 (Written Into the Ear. Lyric Poetry as Acoustic Art from 1750 to 1800), Joh. Nikolaus Schneider draws on this enormous wealth of primary source material to show how the acoustic dimensions of language informed the composition and reception of German-language lyric poetry from 1750 to 1800. Meanwhile, the impact of popular literary reading practices around 1800 has been central to my own research as well as that of scholars such as Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus, Hans-Joachim Jakob, and Martin Danneck. For example, Meyer-Kalkus's Geschichte der literarischen Vortragskunst (History of Literary Elocution, 2020) integrates popular practices of literary declamation and recitation into a broader history of oral reading that encompasses the reading practices of Goethe, Tieck, and Kleist.
Martin Jörg Schäfer. Das Theater der Erziehung: Goethes “pädagogische Provinz” und die Vorgeschichten der Theatralisierung von Bildung. Bielefeld: transcript, 2016. 308 pp.
- from Book Reviews
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- By Mary Helen Dupree, Georgetown University
- Edited by Patricia Anne Simpson, Birgit Tautz
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- Book:
- Goethe Yearbook 26
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 26 June 2019
- Print publication:
- 17 June 2019, pp 316-320
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In this fascinating monograph, Schäfer traces a prehistory of the “theatricalization of education,” culminating in the attitude of “lifelong learning” (lebenslanges Lernen) that has come to dominate discourses around the labor market in the West (and beyond) since the 1990s. In Schäfer's usage, the term “lifelong learning” extends beyond the notion of “adult education” to denote the attitudes, practices, and philosophies associated with a precarious, neoliberal labor market that demands that the individual constantly learn and relearn new modes of performing him- or herself, all the while maintaining that the performance is one of authenticity. Work thus becomes a matter of “virtuosic” performance, to use Paolo Virno's terminology, and leisure too is made productive at the very least through the formation of contacts it enables. Moreover, as Schäfer points out, the contemporary labor market reactivates the traditional eighteenth-century distinction between the “hot” and “cold” actor. As theorized in Diderot's Paradoxe sur le comédien (1773), the “cold” actor subdues his own passions in order to embody a character and feign emotions effectively, whereas the “hot” actor invests emotional energy into his or her roles, often at the risk of becoming overwhelmed by feeling and thus unable to perform. In the twenty-first-century labor market, workers are like “hot actors” who are expected to perform authenticity and “passion.” However, the self-styled “passionate” worker may lose control of the performance, resulting in failure, awkwardness, and even depression as he or she fails to live up to the demands of the theatricalized world of work.
As Schäfer argues in the book's introduction (“Vorspiel”), this apparent interrelation between theater, theatricality, and the optimization of the self through Bildung is no invention of late-stage capitalism, but rather is prefigured by eighteenth- century pedagogical literature. This complex of themes is embodied in the “pedagogical province” in Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, which banished theater and theatricality from their domain in the service of producing “stable” and unified subjects. Drawing on the insights of Luhmannian and Foucauldian social theory as well as the mimetic theory of Philippe Lacoue- Labarthe and others, Schäfer situates Goethe's “pedagogical province” within a larger trajectory of theatricalized education in Western modernity.
What Goethe Heard: Special Section on Hearing and Listening in the Long Eighteenth Century
- from Special Section on What Goethe Heard, edited by Mary Helen Dupree
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- By Mary Helen Dupree, Georgetown University
- Edited by Adrian Daub, Elisabeth Krimmer
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- Book:
- Goethe Yearbook 25
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 16 May 2018
- Print publication:
- 30 June 2018, pp 3-10
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THE THREE ESSAYS IN THIS SPECIAL SECTION ask a deceptively simple and seldom addressed question: What did Goethe (and his contemporaries) hear? While there are numerous monographs and essays on Goethe and visuality, sound and the acoustic dimension have not been explored in the same focused, sustained way in Goethe studies. Indeed, the acoustic dimension has often been marginalized in Goethe scholarship and in eighteenthcentury studies more generally, in which the Enlightenment “hegemony of the visual” tends to reproduce itself. Both in the cultural production of the “long eighteenth century” and in latter-day scholarship, the acoustic appears as the marginalized other of both textuality and visuality. In eighteenthcentury poetological texts and works of criticism, for example, an overemphasis on the acoustic performance of literature is often characterized as potentially inimical to the autonomy of the literary work. Such biases can be seen to be at work, for example, in Schiller's 1789 essay Über Bürgers Gedichte (On Bürger's Poems), in which Schiller distances himself from the oral performance of literature through mildly pejorative references to “Gesellschaftsgesänge” (convivial songs) and “die Musikliebhaberei unserer Damen” (the musical amateurism of our ladies) as well as more explicitly dismissive allusions to Gottfried August Bürger's onomatopoeic excesses—“das Klinglingling, Hopp, Huhu, Sasa, Trallyrum larum u. dgl (the klingaling, hopp, huhu, trallyrum larum and the like).” A simultaneous distrust of and longing for the acoustic dimension, particularly music and its sensual associations, is a recurring theme throughout German literary history: written many years before Thomas Mann's Wagnerian obsessives emerged on paper, the fateful reading of Ossian in Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther offers an early example of how Romantic orality can precipitate unhealthy excesses of emotion and unwholesome collisions of life with art. It is easy enough to contrast the Romantic obsession with reviving the “dead letter of print” through oral performance with Goethe and Schiller's seemingly more mature fascination with the visual and classicist literary forms; if the classical is “healthy,” to paraphrase Goethe's own famous line, it is because it has healed itself from the “sick,” irrational and regressive longings of Romanticism for primitive orality.
“Ein Geschöpf der Einbildung unseres Herrn Leßing”: Fictions of Acting and Virtue in the Postmortem Reception of Charlotte Ackermann (1757–1775)
- Edited by Daniel Purdy, Pennsylvania State University
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- Book:
- Goethe Yearbook 16
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 05 February 2013
- Print publication:
- 15 January 2009, pp 135-160
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Da liegt sie nun, verloren unter Hundert Lebloser Staub, noch jüngst von Tausenden bewundert!
THE SUDDEN DEATH OF A SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD Hamburg actress in May of 1775 inspired a series of elaborate, public mourning rituals that drew the attention of the entire city. An anonymous observer describes the events of these days as follows:
Kürzlich starb hier eine junge Schauspielerin, welche eben sowohl wegen ihrer Talente, als wegen einer seltenen Tugend verehrt wurde. Sie starb plötzlich, und hatte noch den Tag vorher mit vieler Anmuth gespielt. Dieser Fall hat eine allgemeine Traurigkeit veranlaßt. Als ihr entseelter Körper nach hießiger Gewohnheit im Sarge zur Schau gestellt wurde, war der Zulauf, sie zu sehen, unbeschreiblich. Viele, selbst Personen von gesetzten Jahren, bestreuten sie mit Blumen und Lobgedichten. An dem Tage ihrer Beerdigung war der Zulauf noch größer. Der Weg von dem Schauspielhause bis St. Petri war mit vielen tausend Menschen bedeckt, und es herrschte darunter eine außerordentliche Stille. In dem Augenblicke, da man sie einsenkte, wurde ihr Grab fast mit Blumenkränzen beschüttelt. Eine Subscription wurde eröfnet, um ihr ein Monument zu setzen, und sie hatte schleunigen Fortgang.
For a brief time, the loss of an actress unleashed a powerful emotional response in Hamburg, bringing the city's busy commercial life to a temporary halt. This was the first and possibly last time that a German actress was memorialized in this way; several decades later, the German theater historian Eduard Devrient wrote that the fervor with which Hamburg mourned this actress was unrivalled in theater history.