THE DEPARTMENT OF GERMANIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

presents

The Graduate Student / Faculty Colloquium Series

Monday, December 9, 2013 at 9:00 am (breakfast at 8:45)
in the Max Kade German Culture and Media Center 
3401 Walnut St., Room 329, A Wing (entrance next to Starbucks)  

"Sacrificing Religion in Dichtung und Wahrheit"
Daniel DiMassa, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures

The first several books of Dichtung und Wahrheit teem with images of sacrifice: the youthful Goethe's altar to the God of nature, the holocaust of his father's silk worms, a contemplation of Abraham's near sacrifice of Isaac, and even the public burning of an immoral book. What are we to make of these moments? As we know, Goethe's autobiography is a mélange of Dichtung and Wahrheit, but his balance of the two reveals an author at pains to stylize in particular his religious sensibility. That the news of the Lisbon earthquake moved a six-year-old Goethe to question divine justice, for example, seems just as "erdichtet" as the notion that he duped friends by regaling them with gospel-like fairy tales. This paper argues that Goethe's account of his religious maturation operates largely through a pedagogical model that orders his representations of sacrifice. I aim to show that the depictions of sacrifice in Dichtung und Wahrheit continually emerge in subsequently "corrected" reflections: if book one ends with a naive Goethe playing a priest at nature's altar, book two ends with Goethe playing the role of a clever devil who makes a farce of the sacred; if the death of the silk worms appears grotesque and excessive, his dissection and dismemberment of living organisms in the same book is portrayed as a progressive act of scientific research; if at one point an immoral book's burning seems unnatural, Goethe's conflagration of his own juvenilia on a Leipzig stove is portrayed as an instance of artistic reinvention. Insofar as each of these corrections advances Goethe's religious self-understanding as a Promethean Spinozist, we find that sacrifice itself functions as the conceptual altar upon which Goethe sacrifices traditional theism to his own brand of natural religion.

and

"Brothers and Sisters, Lilies and Pretzels: 
Ludwig Emil Grimm and the New Art of the German Märchen"
Professor Catriona MacLeod, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures

Early German Romanticism promises artistic synthesis and unity of the so-called sister arts, yet alongside Friedrich Schlegel’s “Symphilosophie” a hierarchy emerges that places “abstracting” arts such as music and poetry above “material” arts such as sculpture.  In light of book illustration as a burgeoning area of intermedial activity, a must-have for economic success in the publishing trade, and a controversial testing ground for Romantic theories of the arts around 1800, my paper will examine Ludwig Emil Grimm’s unique mediating role as the first German illustrator of his brothers’ fairy tales (1819 and 1825) as well as of Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn collection (1806-8).  Louis Marin’s reminder that frontispiece illustrations should be seen as discursive interventions or instructions as to how a text should be read is salient for these paratexts that also, despite their common author, stand as gatekeepers to two groundbreaking and divergent Romantic visions of folk literature.  “Keeping it in the family,” Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm fortify their purist vision of the Volksmärchen in pictorial terms, while Arnim and Brentano’s eclectic approach to folk material inspires multi-layered illustrations that combine historical and contemporary references ranging from Philipp Otto Runge’s ethereal putti to the folksy art of the pretzel.
This talk will also serve as an introduction to the exhibition “The Enchanted World of German Romantic Prints,” which you can visit at the Philadelphia Museum of Arts until December 29th.
http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/781.html