
Programme 2022-2023

27 October 2022
5.45pm
HOWARD GASKILL (EDINBURGH)
Young Slapsauces and Old Trout: Translating Die Leiden des jungen Werthers.
Despite the appearance of Goethe’s
reworked version of the novel in 1787, the Werther that made all the
running in the Anglophone world, until well into the 19th century, was a relay
translation from the French, based on the Weygand second edition of 1775. It
was not until 1854 that this was superseded by R D Boylan’s translation of the
revised Werther. Since then, to my knowledge, all subsequent
translations into English, apart from William Rose’s in 1929, have been of the
second version. They include at least five this century. In this paper I
discuss some of the issues I have encountered in attempting to English Wertherin its first and most influential incarnation. These will include what has been
called the “instability of originals” and its implications for translators,
also how the Anglophone translator should approach the novel’s extensive
adaptation from Macpherson’s intrinsically unstable Ossian.
This lecture will be given in person (Senate House, Malet Street, Room G37) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free. Advance registration is essential.
Please register HERE.
This lecture will be given in person (Senate House, Malet Street, Room G37) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free. Advance registration is essential.
Please register HERE.
8 December 2022
5.45pm
MAIKE OERGEL ( NOTTINGHAM)
Randfiguren. Ernst Brandes’ and Franz Josias von Hendrich’s Assessments of the French Revolution as new perspectives on old topics.
5.45pm
MAIKE OERGEL ( NOTTINGHAM)
Randfiguren. Ernst Brandes’ and Franz Josias von Hendrich’s Assessments of the French Revolution as new perspectives on old topics.

Looking at Brandes’ Politische Betrachtungen
über die französische Revolution (1790) and Hendrich’s Freymütige Gedanken über
die allerwichtigste Angelegenheit Deutschlands (1794), the paper discusses
these two writers as examples of political and cultural commentators who were
widely read and well respected at the time but are now either completely
forgotten (Hendrich) or only a historical footnote (Brandes). The aim is less
to resurrect them as lost ‘greats’ than to illuminate, through reading their
book-length comments, the complex and shifting reactions to the Revolution in
Germany and to ask why their considerable contemporary fame evaporated so
quickly. Both were early supporters of the original aims of the Revolution,
which does not quite fit the picture of the limited reception Brandes has had
as a political conservative, nor the expectation one might have of Hendrich,
given his life-long high-level involvement in the administration of
Saxe-Meiningen. This approach of investigating ‘temporary canonicity’ yields
twofold gains: writers who are widely read by their contemporaries provide
insights into aspects of the contemporary context that may have become
obscured, while their marginalisation may provide clues, or even evidence, for
subtle historical shifts.
This lecture will be given in person (Senate House, Malet Street, Room G37) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free. Advance registration is essential.
Please register HERE.
This lecture will be given in person (Senate House, Malet Street, Room G37) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free. Advance registration is essential.
Please register HERE.

26 January 2023
6pm
Prawer Lecture
SARAH FENGLER (OXFORD)
Gessner’s Voegel, Klopstock’s Frühlingswürmchen, and Lavater’s Schmetterling. Metaphors of Mortality and Metamorphosis in Eighteenth-Century Religious Literature
(preceded by the Annual General Meeting, at 5.15pm, Senate House, G37)
6pm
Prawer Lecture
SARAH FENGLER (OXFORD)
Gessner’s Voegel, Klopstock’s Frühlingswürmchen, and Lavater’s Schmetterling. Metaphors of Mortality and Metamorphosis in Eighteenth-Century Religious Literature
(preceded by the Annual General Meeting, at 5.15pm, Senate House, G37)
This lecture explores animal metaphors of mortality and metamorphosis in three eighteenth-
century works of religious literature. Gessner’s epic poem Der Tod Abels (1758) describes how
the discovery of a dead bird prompts Eve to reflect on her responsibility for human mortality.
Klopstock’s hymnic poem ‘Die Frühlingsfeyer’ (1759) questions the impermanence of life by
the example of a little insect, the ‘Frühlingswürmchen’. In Lavater’s play Abraham und Isaak
(1776), the metamorphosis of a butterfly proves that death is the threshold to eternity. What
were the functions of animal metaphors in the literary reception of the Bible, and how did they
shape the German-language tradition of religious literature?
This lecture will be given in person (Senate House, Malet Street, Room G37) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free. Advance registration is essential.
Please register HERE.
This lecture will be given in person (Senate House, Malet Street, Room G37) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free. Advance registration is essential.
Please register HERE.
16 March 2023
5.45pm
Wilkinson-Willoughby Lecture
ANNE BOHNENKAMP-RENKEN (FRANKFURT/MAIN)
Genesis. Beobachtungen zur Interdisziplinarität bei Goethe
5.45pm
Wilkinson-Willoughby Lecture
ANNE BOHNENKAMP-RENKEN (FRANKFURT/MAIN)
Genesis. Beobachtungen zur Interdisziplinarität bei Goethe

Mythologisch, biologisch, ästhetisch: Die
Frage nach der Entstehung beschäftigt Goethe in den unterschiedlichsten
Zusammenhängen, der Beobachtung von Entwicklungsprozessen traut er besonderen
Erkenntnisgewinn zu. Ausgehend von philologischen Beobachtungen zur Entstehung
der ‚Klassischen Walpurgisnacht‘ handelt der Vortrag von Goethes
interdisziplinären Vorstellungen von Genesis und erörtert das Verhältnis von
Natur und Kultur im Denken Goethes. Die 1826 bis 1830 nachgetragene
„Vorgeschichte der Helena“ bildet nicht nur eine wichtige Verklammerung mit dem
ersten Teil des ‚Faust‘, Goethes Arbeit an dieser„in‘s Grenzenlose ausgelaufen<en>“
Szene, zu der ausnahmsweise Entwürfe in Prosa überliefert sind, ist geprägt von
Goethes Auseinandersetzung mit den naturwissenschaftlichen Debatten dieser
Zeit.
Please note that there will be a small reception at 5.45pm, and that the actual lecture will start at 6.15pm.
Please register HERE.
Please note that there will be a small reception at 5.45pm, and that the actual lecture will start at 6.15pm.
Please register HERE.

27 April 2023
5.45pm
JOANNA RAISBECK (OXFORD)
Female Quixotes, or: Symptomatic Readers and the Sentimental Novel
5.45pm
JOANNA RAISBECK (OXFORD)
Female Quixotes, or: Symptomatic Readers and the Sentimental Novel
This paper re-examines the well-known fears about
the ill effects – moral, physical, or otherwise – of aesthetic experience at
the end of the eighteenth century. Pathological forms of reading (known
polemically as Lesesucht or Lesewut) became a particular
object of fear, and this will be explored with a focus on texts that were
written in the shadow of Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers.
Such Wertheriaden did not only reproduce the narrative
structure or characters of Goethe’s novel, but also thematised reading as a
social practice, as is the case in Ernst August Anton von Göchhausen’s Das
Werther-Fieber, ein unvollendetes Familienstück (1776), a prose work
that is a satirical take on the idea of reading as a contagion. By interpreting
these fictionalised social practices of reading alongside recent work on ideas
of aesthetic attachment and what constitutes ‘good’ or ‘bad’ reading (Rita
Felski, Merve Emre), the aim of the paper is to demonstrate the reciprocity
between readers and novels – and to consider what agency is granted to readers
of the sentimental novel.
Please register HERE.
Please register HERE.
8 June 2023
5.45pm
CAROL TULLY (BANGOR)
Meister meets Quijote: Singing from the same Hymn Sheet?
5.45pm
CAROL TULLY (BANGOR)
Meister meets Quijote: Singing from the same Hymn Sheet?

Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre appeared in
1795-6, two decades after the publication of F. J. Bertuch’s translation of
Cervantes’ Don Quijote and three years before Tieck’s seminal
translation of the same. Both novels famously feature errant protagonists with
complex lives and problematic love interests. Yet there is undoubtedly more to
say about the interplay between these two works. The question has been
addressed before; for example, Hübner, writing in 1950, notes the ‘influence of
the great Spaniard’ in both the Lehrjahre and Die Wahlverwandtschaften.
How does that influence manifest itself, however? This comparative paper offers
a more detailed exploration of the potential links. The initial focus will be
contextual, with a discussion of Goethe’s reception of Cervantes’ work and the
critical responses of Goetheforschung to this meeting of great minds
across the centuries. Following on from
this, the paper will explore parallels between the texts, building in particular on the work of Barry Ife
on Quijote, in relation
to the use of voice (especially song), dissembling (ventriloquy), and narrative
irony in the Lehrjahre to answer the question posed in the title: Are
Meister and Quijote indeed singing from the same hymn sheet?
Please register HERE.
Please register HERE.