“What’s new with German Romanticism?”—the question gestures to the important contribution of German-language writing to our understanding of the period but also to the trenchant and suggestive interrogation of the category of “newness” by German Romantic writers. Anxiety about whether anything “new” can ever be said or written about anything is, one could argue, constitutive of both Romanticism and our relationship to it.
Abstract
When, in his commentary on G.E. Lessing’s writings, Friedrich Schlegel describes his aim “to characterize the spirit of Lessing as a whole," he evokes the traditional distinction between spirit and letter that had come to form the point of departure for the hermeneutic enterprise, in and beyond biblical exegesis. Yet the meaning that this distinction assumes in Schlegel’s writings, from his earliest studies of Greek and Roman poetry, to his Conversation on Poetry, is not one that would promise interpretive closure of any kind.
Abstract
This essay explores post-Kantian challenges to the Aristotelian proposition and the rationalist model of proof. The first part focuses on Friedrich Schlegel’s efforts to develop a discourse that could reconcile the demand to speak freely with the demand to speak the truth. The second part shows how Edgar Allan Poe and Stéphane Mallarmé continue Schlegel’s project as they grapple with Romantic ideas about wit and the autonomy of poetic language.
Balancing Acts: Modes of Equilibrium in Romanticism and Nature Philosophy around 1800
Jocelyn HollandAbstract
As is the case with its English counterpart, equilibrium, the German word Gleichgewicht is a concept whose origins are rooted in the world of materiality and practice. Both can be traced to the simple act of balancing objects on a scale (libra in Latin and Wiege in German, which is the root of Gewicht): this familiar practice and the equally simple instrument associated with it form the material basis for quantitative measures of equilibrium.
Abstract
This article links E.T.A Hoffmann's prose to the neglected Enlightenment university discipline Technologie as invented by the polymath Johann Beckmann. The connection between narrative and technology occurs not at the level of symbols or in diegesis but in the manipulation of form, which had consequences for the construal of life outside the constraints of emergent disciplines like medicine, forensic psychology, and the changing institution of the police.
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New Work on German Romanticism © 2016 by Zachary Sng is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0