Journal Poetics · Literature and Media in the Age of Goethe

Journal Poetics - Literature and Media in the Age of Goethe

Context : Scholars consider the Age of Goethe (“Goethezeit”), i.e., the period between ca. 1770–1830, the climax of German literary history. Its most typical features are usually described in terms of aesthetic autonomy, classicism, and an male elitist concept of highbrow art. Hence, the Age of Goethe is supposed to have produced works that neither addressed a broader audience nor participated in daily political and life-world themes. The overall objective of the “Journal Poetics”-project is to revisit this narrative which persists even in new introductions and manuals on the era. The key to this is to look at the history of media, and to focus for the first time on a medium that established itself as the central form of publication around 1800: the journal. By focusing on journals, I will be able to shed light on largely ignored aspects and actors, i.e., popular literature, minor but successful authors of literary history, and above all women, who crucially shaped journal culture, serving by no means only as recipients, but also as authors and editors. In order to analyse all these aspects, I will develop a new heuristic instrument: the concept of “Journal Poetics”. This concept centres on the production side (poiesis), which makes journal editors and publishers (including intellectual women) on the one hand, and journal authors (including female authors like Caroline von Wolzogen and Sophie Mereau-Brentano) on the other hand, the starting point for the analysis. A systematic study of five journals of the time will open up a ‘different’ Age of Goethe, which will turn out to be more heterogeneous in terms of media, more popular, and more female-oriented than the monolithic image we have of it. This corpus is thus carefully and pragmatically selected: it covers the core phase of the Age of Goethe and is centred around the most important actors and their networks. The project refers to three current research areas and aims to further develop them: (1) cultural and literary history of the Age of Goethe, (2) Periodical Studies, and (3) Gender Studies. (1) The Age of Goethe (ca. 1770–1830) is internationally considered the central era of German literary and cultural history. The term encompasses Weimar Classicism, early Idealism, and Romanticism, covering a wide range of intellectual phenomena well beyond disciplinary distinctions. The keyword “aesthetics of autonomy” is repeatedly cited as a decisive, unifying feature of the time, aimed at describing the peculiar art theory developed by leading figures such as Goethe, Schiller, and Kant. According to the common point of view, these authors maintained a belief in the autonomy of art, preferring to keep it separate from political and social functions, even in times of upheaval (i.e., the French Revolution). Both enthusiastic apologists of German identity and well-known champions of an ideology-critical standpoint such as Heine, Nietzsche and Adorno have supported this narrative. The former group celebrated concepts such as “humanity” (“Humanität”), “art religion” (“Kunstreligion”), “the beautiful” (“das Schöne”), “aesthetic education” (“ästhetische Erziehung”) and “aesthetic play” (“ästhetisches Spiel”) as achievements of the German spirit, the latter criticised escapism, intellectual aloofness, and elitism as inevitable consequences of such an attitude towards reality.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union