Kevin Hilliard

Wieland, Cynics, Goethe

Abstract Wieland’s idealizing treatment of ancient Cynicism in his novel Σωκράτης μαινόμενος oder die Dialogen des Diogenes von Sinope (1770) provoked a critical response from the young Goethe. The elements of Cynicism Wieland took care to extrude were turned by Goethe into a set of positive ideals. Not only his Götter, Helden und Wieland (1772), but a number of shorter dramatic works of the period, including Satyros (1773), profited from this inversion of values. However, this aesthetic divergence should not obscure the fact that both Wieland and Goethe were drawn to Cynicism because of its significance as a testing-ground of Enlightenment thought.

'Ein Hogarthisches unsinniges Tollhauslächeln': The Portrait of La Mettrie and the Problem of the Laughing Philosopher in Eighteenth-Century Germany

Abstract The essay examines the comments made on a portrait of the French materialist philosopher Julien Offray de la Mettrie by a number of German critics, chiefly Lessing and Lavater. I claim that aesthetic arguments are used as proxies for ideological disagreement. In particular, I argue that Lessings celebrated criticism of the representation of duration in the visual arts, in his Laokoon, is motivated by theological concerns. I show further that Lessings argument was used to buttress the cruder calumnies of Lavater and others. The corpus of comments over a thirty-year period show how difficult it was for German thinkers to accept philosophical materialism as a position deserving intellectual respect.

Desire and Decorum: Goethe's ‘Der neue Pausias und sein Blumenmädchen’

Der neue Pausias und sein Blumenmadchen Pausias von Sicyon, der Maler, war als Jungling in Glyceren, seine Mitburgerin, verliebt, welche Blumenkranze zu winden einen sehr erfinderischen Geist hatte; sie wetteiferten mit einander, und er brachte die Nachahmung der Blumen zur groBten Mannichfaltigkeit. Endlich malte er seine Geliebte, sitzend, mit einem Kranze beschaftigt. Dieses Bild wurde fur eins seiner besten gehalten, und die Kranzwinderin, oder Kranzhandlerin genannt, weil Glycere sich auf diese Weise als ein armes Madchen emahrt hatte. Lucius Lucullus kaufte eine Kopie in Athen fur zwei Talente. Plinius. B. XXXV. C. XL

German Philosophy and Criticism

‘We suspect that German philosophy is at present the noblest in Europe; and we are sure that German criticism is at present the best.’ The reviewer in the London Magazine (1820, p. 66) gave voice to a sentiment which had been on the increase since the beginning of the century. It was through and in the writings of Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel and others that the Romantic movement became most fully conscious of itself, of its religious, metaphysical, aesthetic and literary principles. English Romanticism, too, incurred a debt to German theory.

“Stammelnd Gered’” und “der Engel Sprach’”: Probleme der Rede bei Klopstock

ZusammenfassungVorliegender Aufsatz geht Begriffen nach, mit denen Klopstock Extremzustände der Rede bezeichnet. Dabei werden die Umrisse einer vor allem für die geistlichen Gedichte (Lieder, Oden, Hymnen) bedeutsamen, an theologischen Grundsätzen wie auch an kulturgeschichtlichen und nachahmungstheoretischen Positionen ausgerichteten immanenten Poetik sichtbar.AbstractThis essay examines concepts with which Klopstock describes extreme states of utterance. An immanent poetic emerges which is oriented towards theological doctrines as well as towards theories of cultural history and imitation. This poetic has especial importance for Klopstock’s religious poetry.