John B. Lyon

You Can Kill, but You Cannot Bring to Life: Aesthetic Education and the Instrumentalization of Pain in Schiller and Holderlin

Pain and physical violence are instrumental for German Classicism, that is, their representation serves an aesthetic and cultural ideal. This article locates pain and violence within the discourses of Bildung and aesthetics in late 18th Century Germany, and analyzes Friedrich Schillers and Friedrich Hölderlins responses to these discourses. Hölderlin, in his novel Hyperion, rejects the tendency of this era to instrumentalize pain. Initially, Hölderlin modeled his ideas of aesthetics and development on Friedrich Schillers, which privilege pain in order to further aesthetic and social ideals (i.e. the concept of Bildung). Ultimately, however, Hölderlin rejects Schillers approach and posits a model of aesthetic Bildung that privileges the expression rather than the instrumentalization of pain. In doing so, he asserts a poetics of empathy, one that privileges expression of both individual and communal pain, yet that likewise must also forsake the ideals and totalities espoused by this epoch.

Metamimesis: Imitation in Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Early German Romanticism by Mattias Pirholt (review)

Mattias Pirholt, Metamimesis: Imitation in Goethes Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Early German Romanticism. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012.220 pp.In this ambitious monograph, Mattias Pirholt argues against those who find in German Romanticism a wholesale refutation of mimetic aesthetics. He proposes instead that Romantics reinterpreted ideas from eighteenth-century debates on representation, such as the productivity of both the artist and nature and the conception of art as a formation of alternative and ideal worlds. The Romantic work combines both mimetic and self-reflective practices; it reproduces mimesis metapoetically as a representation of representation and reflects on the very conditions of representation. As such, Romantic mimesis is inherently metamimesis, a transcendental investigation into the relationship between life and poetry.The monograph has five main chapters. The first is a theoretical and historical introduction to the Romantic period, the concept of mimesis, and the genre of the novel. In Romanticism, mimesis represents poiesis.That is, it imitates not a static object but a creative process that strives for the unattainable. In this context, the novel is the mimetic genre par excellence due to its preoccupation with life in all its aspects. In striving for the absolute, the metamimetically self-reflec-tive novel contains and reflects all forms of poetic expression. Its focus on the production of life transforms questions of aesthetics into questions of social relations and the form of society.In the following chapters Pirholt analyzes four influential novels written around 1800. Goethes Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre is the starting point, both as irritation and inspiration,for the metamimetic novels of Romanticism. In Goethes novel Pirholt finds two modes of representation-narration and dialogue- which mirror Platos distinction between diegesis and mimesis. Goethe is unable to mend the rupture between these two modes except with a new kind of image, one that is indicated but never fully realized in the novel: the symbol. In the image and the symbol, one finds representation of the unity that supports and precedes difference. For Goethe, representational difference constitutes both a point of departure for the protagonists life story and a state to be overcome.In subsequent chapters Pirholt focuses on Friedrich Schlegels Lucinde, Novaliss Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and Clemens Brentanos Godwi, reading each as a metamimetic response to the problem that Goethe posed. In Schlegels text, repetition constitutes the principal aesthetic structure, and in this regard, the novel is intrinsically mimetic. This form of imitation does not signify a stable and essential identity; instead, the novel offers an allegorical-mimetic play of difference and repetition and thus rejects any form of original or ultimate unity. Representation and imitation become nonprogressive games performed within the world and are not signs of the absolute.Novalis, in contrast, differentiates between two modes of representation: the philosophical, which derives from difference, and the poetic, which strives for similarity and unity. Pirholt draws on Novaliss concept of the ordo inversus as a combination of similarity and difference and asserts that for Novalis, life is representable only in its opposite. …

Kleist's Prinz Friedrich von Homburg and the Crisis of Masculinity

The author draws on contemporary gender and masculinity studies and links notions of masculinity in Kleists era to the emerging public sphere. In Kleists Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, masculinity is a fragile construct that requires repeated and even violent interventions to sustain it. It is grounded in textual relationships between men (homotextuality), yet is also bound to political power, for state authority regulates writing and reading. The drama portrays a struggle where the Elector controls both writing and masculinity and where the Prince and others, both male and female, violate the norms that restrict writing and define gender roles. The results of this conflict—the Prince ultimately fails in his efforts to assert his manhood and the Elector relinquishes some control over writing and masculinity—serve less to subvert gender roles during Kleists era and more to highlight their precarious, constructed nature.