Simon Richter

Unwrapping Goethe's Weimar : essays in cultural studies and local knowledge

Introduction: like a box of chocolates..., Simon Richter. Part 1 Selling Weimar by the kilo: Goethe, advertising, marketing, and merchandising the classical, Burkhard Henke Weimar classicism and the origins of consumer culture, Daniel Purdy. Part 2 Weimar and the senses: floating heads - Weimar portrait busts, Catriona MacLeod music in Weimar circa 1780 - decentering text, decentering Goethe, annie Janeiro Randall. Part 3 Performativity and transgression in Weimar: war and dramaturgy - Goethes command of the Weimar theatre, Karin Schutjer from Werther to Amazons - cross-dressing and male-male desire, Susan E. Gustafson. Part 4 Women in Weimar: sartorial transgressions - re-dressing class and gender hierarchies in masquerades and travesties, Elisabeth Krimmer women writers and the authorization of literary practice, Linda Dietrick the hunchback of Weimar - Louise von Gochhausen and the weimar grotesque, Susanne Kord. Part 5 Wrapping up the Weimar myth: creation and constipation - Don Carlos and Schillers blocked passage to Weimar, Stephanie B. Hammer skeletons in Goethes closet - human rights, protest, and the myth of political liberality, W. Daniel Wilson the Weimar myth - from city of the arts to global village, Gert Theile.

The "Rauschen" of the Waves: On the Margins of Literature

I return to the ocean and into its ground[....]the fish, what does it do? What sort of new water-senses does it have, that we air and earth creatures do not feel? Can they not be analogically discovered? If a human being is ever to become aware of magnetic force then it would be a blind man who can only hear and feel, or more a man bereft of sight, hearing, smell and taste, who could only feel. What sort of senses does a fish have? In the twilight of the water it sees, in the heavy air it hears; in its thick shell the oyster feels[. .. . ]As wave breaks into wave, so the air undulations and sounds flow into each other. The sensuousness of the water-world is as water is to air in hearing and seeing!2

Goethe’s Faust and the Ecolinguistics of

Scholarship now understands that Goethe’s Faust is not a celebration of modernity, but rather its critique. Faust’s striving comes at a cost measured in human lives, shattered economies, failing empires, territorial wars, and environmental degradation. What was understood as the vision of a free republic of the Faustian spirit is now seen as Goethe’s critique of capitalism, colonialism, and technology. If Goethe does not champion Faust as the modern individual, does he offer an alternative? This chapter argues that we can discern in Faust an ecolinguistic conception of an ego that diminishes in response to an awareness of nature, history, and geological time. Karl Buhler’s model of the “here-now-I system of subjective orientation” provides a new way of thinking about place that is already instantiated in Goethe’s Faust.

The Colors of Lola

The unveiling is at hand. Lola, the gorgeous, imposing drag queen from London, has come to the Price Shoe Factory in rural Northampton to see Charlie’s creation: leather boots for the demanding male- to- female transvestite. Charlie presents the boots. But there is a slight problem with the color. Lola expresses her dissatisfaction with increasing campy vehemence: “Burgundy. Please, God, tell me I’ve not inspired something burgundy. Red. Red! Red!! Red, Charlie boy. Rule one. Red … is the color of sex. Burgundy is the color of hot water bottles. Red is the color of sex and fear and danger and signs that say, ‘Do Not Enter.’ All of my favorite things in life!” The Lola of Kinky Boots is right. Red is Lola’s color. Lola Montez knew this. Joseph Stieler also knew it—his 1847 portrait of Lola is seared with the red color of her lips, the flowers in her hair, the couch behind her, and the ruby in her necklace. This being the case, just imagine the plight of black- and- white cinema! It would be thirty years before cinema could show Lola’s colors.

Weimar Heteroclassicism: Wilhelm von Humboldt, Caroline von Wolzogen, and the Aesthetics of Gender

Abstract This article argues that Wilhelm von Humboldt’s two essays on gender published in early issues of Schiller’s Die Horen lay out a ‘heteroclassical’ aesthetics that provides for exuberant literary and cultural participation by women in the project of Weimar Classicism. In Caroline von Wolzogen’s novel Agnes von Lilien we see Humboldt’s heteroclassical aesthetics at work as the heroine of the novel resolutely withstands pressure to renounce the object of her desire in a manner which instantiates a female mode of aesthetic autonomy.

Wieland And The Phallic Breast

In recent years the cultural history of the female breast has become a focus of attention. Scholars of the eighteenth century have explored the construction of motherhood and the anti-wet-nursing debates that followed the European reception of Rousseau’s Emile. The present article proceeds under the assumption that powerful cultural fantasies relating to the breast are at work in the late eighteenth century. By investigating the works of one of the more breast-obsessed writers of the Rococo and Classical periods, Christoph Martin Wieland, the article shows both Wieland’s rhetorical efforts to materialise the breast in the text for his readers and the unexpected propensity of the breast to attain threatening or phallic proportions. The article pays particular attention to Wieland’s Musarion, Agathon, and ‘Gedanken uber die Ideale der Alten’.