Sean Franzel

Romantic Encyclopedics and the Lecture Form: Schelling, A.W. Schlegel, A. von Humboldt

This essay addresses the proliferation of Romantic-era lecture series that aspired to encyclopedic scope and subject matter, sketching how the lecture became a privileged vehicle for articulating visions of the interconnection of all knowledge. Along with a brief account of how the Romantic lecture reworked earlier forms of scholarship and meta-scientific summary, this essay explores certain concrete institutional, medial, and formal features of lecture series by Schelling, Schlegel, and Humboldt. These features include the sequential unfolding of the lecture series; the differentiation between “historical” and “living” knowledge; the scene of pedagogical address; and the underpinnings of certain styles of scholarly lecturing in the conceptual apparatus and polemical self-presentation of German idealism.

A "Popular," "Private" Lecturer?: Kant's Theory and Practice of University Instruction

In this article I explore Kant’s theory of the scholar through the dual lens of his own lecture practice and his writings about scholarly speech. Along with analyzing two of Kant’s wellknown works on the public sphere and the university (the 1784 “Enlightenment” essay and the 1798 Conflict of the Faculties), I examine a transcript of one of Kant’s lecture courses to test out his programmatic account of university instruction. I show that Kant strategically aligns his own lecture practice with a “popular” mode of discourse in line with contemporary Popularphilosophen but not with his transformative paradigm of “public” scholarly speech in the print public sphere. I argue that the lecture takes on a conflicted, almost paradoxical position in Kant’s thought as a popular, but not fully public mode of discourse.

Zuschauer im Eckfenster 1821/22 oder Selbstreflexion der Journalliteratur im Journal(text). Mit einem Faksimile des Zuschauers vom April/Mai 1822.Von Nicola Kaminski and Volker Mergenthaler. Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2015. 249 Seiten + zahlreiche farbige Abbildungen. €48,00.

gential contact in this brevity. This is not to devalue the study completely, but only to question where we should position it within the large body of scholarship already extant and accessible. The position that the author constantly works from, that “alle Deutungen sind Fehldeutungen” (60), can grow glib rather than liberating. Similarly, the skepticism bearing on statements about the book by Goethe, or on the narrator’s viewpoint on events within the narrative, do not really produce much opening of perspectives. It is rather constitutive of the novel itself, in its unique composition, that Goethe has created a narrator who provides both facts and occasionally astute commentary, but who fails to make connections that do emerge for the reader. That is where we alight in determining what each event signifies for the process of the disaster, and indeed whether we should read it as a tragic outcome. This slender volume does distill a coherent set of premises from the restricted range of its philosophical foundation. On the other hand the positions taken here seem to dissolve when set out in the larger context of questions that have given rise to the most enriching debates over the past two centuries. For example, the debate over the tragic quality of Ottilie’s end and the collapse of all hope for the other characters began in earnest in the weeks following the novel’s first publication. The question of a tragic aesthetic value has inspired creative critical scrutiny on both sides ever since. Therefore one wonders where this leaves the “philosophische Lektüre” that declares “Die Philosophie verweigert sich der Erfahrung des Tragischen” (69). The novel opens the reader’s perspective to an elusive dialectics of tragic experience. To foreclose this denies literary history our clear understanding that tragedy does not depend on a Greek pagan view of fate. It evolves with human concerns, and, contrary to the philosophical reasoning presented in the closing chapter of this book, tragic experience certainly penetrates far into Christian civilization and—one can well argue— beyond it. Whether it crosses over into the genre of the novel with Die Wahlverwandtschaften may be hard to answer, but that has certainly remained as a vital question.

Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism by Adrian Daub (review)

Atalanta, resolutely averse to marriage, is repeatedly thwarted by the other characters in her attempt to retain her independence as a virgin huntress. As the didactic nature of these plays would have it, she is in the end “tamed” through the revelation of her true identity and moves into her proper position on the threshold of the altar. In a similar manner, the sister called Julchen in Gellert’s Die zärtlichen Schwestern insists on her autonomy as an unmarried woman, preferring friendship to marriage. Because the mores of the time regard such views as subversive to the social order, however, she is ultimately manipulated into accepting marriage. Potter does not merely present the victory of this institution over the forces opposing it but acknowledges the ways in which the advocacy of the sentimental marriage reveals its repressive nature. The sentimental marriage is perhaps most strikingly called into question in Quistorp’s Der Hypochondrist, written in the context of eighteenth-century medical, literary, and popular discourse on the topic of hypochondria. The play posits that hypochondria is caused by homosexuality, both of which oppose marriage. In using hypochondria as a means of avoiding marriage and heterosexual relations, Quistorp’s protagonist is able to strengthen his bond with his male servant, the object of his desire. Potter demonstrates the ways in which satirical comedy in this play is intended to effect moral reform in the audience by functioning as a corrective for nonnormative behavior, specifically homosexuality. Potter’s book makes use of various insights contributed by gender studies in recent decades. His chapter on cross-dressing in Lessing’s Der Misogyne, for instance, examines the dichotomy between the constructed, performative nature of gender roles and the extent to which gender is grounded in the body. Yet this and other analyses might have profited from consideration of theorists on gender and performance, such as Judith Butler, to mention perhaps the best known of these thinkers. The plays Potter treats were to varying degrees popular in their day, but they are obviously not part of today’s dramatic canon. This fact perhaps explains why Potter discusses the works in great detail, providing extensive plot summaries. At times this practice is excessive, and it occasionally leads to repetition. However, the study is extremely well researched, and Potter clearly knows the literature on the plays he examines. Although the subject matter is strictly German, his translation of all quotations into English widens his audience considerably. The book should be of interest to specialists in eighteenth-century studies, comic drama, gender studies, and the history of marriage and the family, among other fields. Marriage, Gender, and Desire does much to illuminate social issues and institutions which, while finding their cultural articulation in the eighteenth century, are still of central importance in our own times.Atalanta, resolutely averse to marriage, is repeatedly thwarted by the other characters in her attempt to retain her independence as a virgin huntress. As the didactic nature of these plays would have it, she is in the end “tamed” through the revelation of her true identity and moves into her proper position on the threshold of the altar. In a similar manner, the sister called Julchen in Gellert’s Die zärtlichen Schwestern insists on her autonomy as an unmarried woman, preferring friendship to marriage. Because the mores of the time regard such views as subversive to the social order, however, she is ultimately manipulated into accepting marriage. Potter does not merely present the victory of this institution over the forces opposing it but acknowledges the ways in which the advocacy of the sentimental marriage reveals its repressive nature. The sentimental marriage is perhaps most strikingly called into question in Quistorp’s Der Hypochondrist, written in the context of eighteenth-century medical, literary, and popular discourse on the topic of hypochondria. The play posits that hypochondria is caused by homosexuality, both of which oppose marriage. In using hypochondria as a means of avoiding marriage and heterosexual relations, Quistorp’s protagonist is able to strengthen his bond with his male servant, the object of his desire. Potter demonstrates the ways in which satirical comedy in this play is intended to effect moral reform in the audience by functioning as a corrective for nonnormative behavior, specifically homosexuality. Potter’s book makes use of various insights contributed by gender studies in recent decades. His chapter on cross-dressing in Lessing’s Der Misogyne, for instance, examines the dichotomy between the constructed, performative nature of gender roles and the extent to which gender is grounded in the body. Yet this and other analyses might have profited from consideration of theorists on gender and performance, such as Judith Butler, to mention perhaps the best known of these thinkers. The plays Potter treats were to varying degrees popular in their day, but they are obviously not part of today’s dramatic canon. This fact perhaps explains why Potter discusses the works in great detail, providing extensive plot summaries. At times this practice is excessive, and it occasionally leads to repetition. However, the study is extremely well researched, and Potter clearly knows the literature on the plays he examines. Although the subject matter is strictly German, his translation of all quotations into English widens his audience considerably. The book should be of interest to specialists in eighteenth-century studies, comic drama, gender studies, and the history of marriage and the family, among other fields. Marriage, Gender, and Desire does much to illuminate social issues and institutions which, while finding their cultural articulation in the eighteenth century, are still of central importance in our own times.

Welches Gesetz ist der Mensch in seiner Wirksamkeit?: Pedagogy and Media in Fichte's Encounter with Mesmerism

The author explores how Fichtes encounter with Mesmerism and the Mesmerist cure puts pressure on his conception of pedagogy and communications media. For Fichte, Mesmers theory of animal magnetism offers a competing model of interpersonal relation undescribable by the logic of the self-conscious subject. The author argues that Fichtes consideration of Mesmerism in light of the oral lecture—a fixture of German scholarly culture and of Fichtes engagement as a public intellectual—reveals certain fundamental tensions at work in concepts of mediation, communication, autonomy, and intersubjectivity, concepts that in turn organize the idealistneohumanist notion of Bildung.