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Law and Literature: Codes as Colonizing Texts and Legal Ideas in Anthropocene Works
- 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 337-344
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Summary
THE STUDY OF LAW AND LITERATURE has a rich history in Germanistik and promises a bright future. As Elizabeth S. Anker and Bernadette Meyler note in their introduction to New Directions in Law and Literature (2017), myriad new interdisciplinary methodologies and inquiries have proliferated over the past decade. For my contribution to this Forum, I do not wish to recite the long list of Dichterjuristen (lawyer-poets) who inspired the first generation of scholars to investigate this intersection. Nor is my goal to review the recent work of our colleagues who have examined the interrelationships of law and humanistic inquiry more broadly. Rather, I seek to encourage continued innovation by highlighting a largely overlooked genre that may be especially fruitful for scholars of the Goethezeit (Age of Goethe) to explore and by adumbrating an emerging legal question into which we, as literary scholars, may have special insight.
“Law and Literature” has often been conceived of as having two branches: law in literature and law as literature. This distinction has, thankfully, been challenged to reveal the complex entanglement of laws and literatures in their various forms. After all, law also shapes literature, literature influences the law, and both share a number of imaginative and narrative capacities. To name just two terrific, recent studies, Chenxi Tang thoroughly examines how literature has shaped international law in Imagining World Order (2018) and Javier Samper Vendrell's fourth chapter in The Seduction of Youth (2020) considers the ways in which the Weimar Republic's Gesetz zur Bewahrung der Jugend vor Schund- und Schmutzschriften (Law for the Protection of Youth Against Trash and Smut) shaped queer periodicals. Yet the root division—“law in” and “law as”—helpfully draws attention to the tendency of most scholars to focus primarily on one object—the law or literature. Indeed, the ideas discussed below might each be thought to fall into just one of these traditional categories. But this distinction should compel us to interrogate the consequences of that focus and what else might be missing. As we continue to study the interrelationships of law and literature in the Age of Goethe, I hope we will increasingly attend to bigger questions about colonialism and the environment, in particular.
Goethe and the Uncontrollable Business of Appropriative Stage Sequels
- from Special Section on What Goethe Heard, edited by Mary Helen Dupree
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- By Matthew H. Birkhold, The Ohio State 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 109-132
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Summary
IN THE FINAL DECADES Of the eighteenth century, writers regularly borrowed fictional characters invented by other authors for use in their own texts. Most commonly, these works took the form of sequels—what German contemporaries dubbed “Fortsetzungen einer fremden Hand” (continuations by another hand), and what this article names “appropriative sequels.” In the absence of formal legal regulation, many authors felt free to write such texts, including Goethe. But little work has been done to understand this surprisingly widespread writing practice, particularly in light of the commercial realities of the German theater. As William Hinrichs recently put it: “We do not know what to call these sequels; we do not know how to talk about them; we do not know how they function; and we do not know why people read and write them.” Turning to Goethe begins to provide answers.
It is well known that Goethe was preoccupied with sequels; after all, he devoted much of his literary life to Faust II, as well as sequels to Wilhelm Meister, Des Künstlers Erdewallen (1773) and Des Künstlers Vergötterung (1774). Fewer scholars have noted, however, that Goethe also made something of a habit of writing sequels to other authors’ works. Between 1793 and 1806, Goethe began Die Aufgeregten (1793), conceived with Schiller a sequel to Die Hagestolzen (sometime between 1793 and 1805), and published two sequels: Der Bürgergeneral (1793) and Der Zauberflöte, Zweyter Theil (begun in 1795, and first published in 1806). Goethe wrote his appropriative sequels when he was faced with new pressures as director of the Weimar Court Theater and increasingly conscious of the market value of literature.
Taken together, Der Bürgergeneral and Der Zauberflöte, Zweyter Theil offer new insights into the business of appropriative stage sequels. To date, scholarship has overlooked the self-reflexivity of Goethe's Zauberflöte and its own observation of sequels on the German stage. Analyzing Der Zauberflöte,
Zweyter Theil as an aesthetic comment on appropriative sequels offers a new reading of Goethe's perplexing libretto and helps explain why these texts proliferated around 1800. Furthermore, studying the reception of Der Bürgergeneral, a sequel to Heyne's Die beiden Billets (1782), illuminates how the issues raised in Goethe's Zauberflöte sequel played out in the literary field, highlighting the uncontainable nature of these works.