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 It was not until 1854 that this was superseded by R D Boylan’s translation of the revised Werther.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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

16 March 2023
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 register HERE.

27 April 2023
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.

8 June 2023
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.