Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Journal Poetics (Journal Poetics - Literature and Media in the Age of Goethe)
Reporting period: 2023-08-01 to 2025-07-31
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.
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.
Over the course of the fellowship, I was able to carry out my research extensively. I presented my papers at international conferences, gave guest seminars and organised international workshops in Saarbrücken (Germany), Vienna (Austria) and Verona (Italy). I have written several papers that will be published soon. Some have already been published. I have finished my monograph ‘Journalpoetik. Literatur im Medienwandel (1770-1840)’ as planned. It will be published by De Gruyter in 2025.
Outcome, articles:
- Journalpoetik und Luisenkult. Kleists “Berliner Abendblätter” im Spektrum der Hauptstadtpresse. In: Kleist-Jahrbuch 2024. Hg. von Anne Fleig u.a. Metzler, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2024, S. 315-330.
- Astrid Dröse: Werthers Welt. Realismus beim jungen Goethe. (Themenschwerpunkt ‚250 Jahre Werther‘ Zeitschrift für Germanistik. Hg. von Frieder von Ammon und Alexander Košenina NF XXXIV,2 (2024), 281–297. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3726/92174_281(opens in new window)
- Weltliteratur und Divan-Apokryphen. Ottilie von Goethes Zeitschrift Chaos (1829–1831). In: Goethe-Jahrbuch 140 (2023), S. 135–150.
- Luise Adelgunde Gottsched. Die Dramen. In: Gottsched Handbuch. Leben, Werk, Wirkung. Hg. von Sebastian Meixner und Carolin Rocks. Berlin 2023, S. 389–400. DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-05967-3_19
- Durchschossener Macbeth. Shakespeare-Übersetzungen des 18. Jahrhunderts zwischen Handschrift und Druck (Wieland, Eschenburg). In: Handschrift und Druck. Annotieren, Kommentieren, Weiterschreiben (1500–1800). Hg. von Sylvia Brockstieger und Rebecca Hirt. Heidelberg 2023, 171–192. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111191560-008(opens in new window)
Forthcoming
- Periodizität und Serialität. Literaturtheorie in Stücken. In: Lessings Hamburgische Dramaturgie im Europäischen Kontext, hg. von Jörg Robert/Jörn Steigerwald (2025)
- Aufklärungsfeminismus und europäischer Kulturtransfer. Neue Perspektiven auf Christiana Mariana von Ziegler. In: Autorinnen an der Peripherie, hg. von Corinna Dziudzua
- Luise Gottsched as reviewer. In: Philosophical Reviews in the German speaking world. Ed. by Laura Macor and Marco Sgarbi (2025)
Outcome, articles:
- Journalpoetik und Luisenkult. Kleists “Berliner Abendblätter” im Spektrum der Hauptstadtpresse. In: Kleist-Jahrbuch 2024. Hg. von Anne Fleig u.a. Metzler, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2024, S. 315-330.
- Astrid Dröse: Werthers Welt. Realismus beim jungen Goethe. (Themenschwerpunkt ‚250 Jahre Werther‘ Zeitschrift für Germanistik. Hg. von Frieder von Ammon und Alexander Košenina NF XXXIV,2 (2024), 281–297. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3726/92174_281(opens in new window)
- Weltliteratur und Divan-Apokryphen. Ottilie von Goethes Zeitschrift Chaos (1829–1831). In: Goethe-Jahrbuch 140 (2023), S. 135–150.
- Luise Adelgunde Gottsched. Die Dramen. In: Gottsched Handbuch. Leben, Werk, Wirkung. Hg. von Sebastian Meixner und Carolin Rocks. Berlin 2023, S. 389–400. DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-05967-3_19
- Durchschossener Macbeth. Shakespeare-Übersetzungen des 18. Jahrhunderts zwischen Handschrift und Druck (Wieland, Eschenburg). In: Handschrift und Druck. Annotieren, Kommentieren, Weiterschreiben (1500–1800). Hg. von Sylvia Brockstieger und Rebecca Hirt. Heidelberg 2023, 171–192. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111191560-008(opens in new window)
Forthcoming
- Periodizität und Serialität. Literaturtheorie in Stücken. In: Lessings Hamburgische Dramaturgie im Europäischen Kontext, hg. von Jörg Robert/Jörn Steigerwald (2025)
- Aufklärungsfeminismus und europäischer Kulturtransfer. Neue Perspektiven auf Christiana Mariana von Ziegler. In: Autorinnen an der Peripherie, hg. von Corinna Dziudzua
- Luise Gottsched as reviewer. In: Philosophical Reviews in the German speaking world. Ed. by Laura Macor and Marco Sgarbi (2025)
My project ‘JOURNAL POETICS’ was an attempt to rewrite the history of literature from the late Enlightenment (1770) to early Realism (around 1840) from the perspective of media history - using the journal as a guideline. At the same time, the aim was to define the journal as a central epistemic object of literary research and to develop a methodology for analysing it in line with the recently flourishing international journal research and periodical studies. I have coined the term ‘journal poetics’ to describe this new methodology. The starting point was the concern to question established epochal narratives: in the course of the 19th century, an epochal image of the Goethe era was shaped that is closely linked to the work-like, completed book as the guarantor of an elitist, art-autonomous claim to validity. This autonomous aesthetic perspective promoted the prejudice of an unworldly art doctrine that emerged in the course of the ‘classical legend’ (Berghahn et al.), whose representatives had acted beyond the market and even against their own audience - with the consequence of basically not having been read. The representatives of Weimar ‘court classicism’, above all Schiller, the ‘court poet[] of German idealism’ (Adorno), and Goethe, had thus brought about a fatal dichotomisation of German literature under the sign of an ‘autonomy doctrine’ (Ch. Bürger) and also contributed to a massive devaluation and exclusion of women writers. The central thesis of this study, however, is that these epochal narratives begin to falter when we look at the dynamic media realities and fluid publication contexts around 1800. The starting point was an initially surprising finding: the age of autonomy aesthetics, of all eras, witnessed the rapid rise of the periodical as a popular mass medium of literature. Protagonists of the era such as Wieland, Schiller and Goethe played a pioneering role in this. The ‘Kunsteperiode’ (Heine) is the period of the periodical. For the key players of Goethe's time, the periodical was therefore not the other side of their concept of art, but rather its essential medium. Periodicals such as the Teutsche Merkur, the Thalia and the Horen were catalysts of literary and aesthetic development; they enabled and thus favoured the formation of a literary field by producing the model of the free, market-dependent writer. The aim of the study was thus to unfold an overall panorama of periodical culture from around 1770 to 1840, alternating between overview and detailed description. It is within this time frame that the central change in media history takes place, in the course of which the journal establishes itself alongside the book as the most important, complementary media format in literature.
In terms of methodology, my project draws on the recently flourishing international journal research and periodical studies as well as the latest studies on material formats of literature (Spoerhase). Network theories (Latour) combined with aspects of social history and literary sociology (Bourdieu, H. S. Becker, Reckwitz) also provided starting points for a decidedly praxeological approach: in addition to the material-philological and reception-aesthetic perspective of current journal research (DFG research group ‘Journal Literature’), my project takes the journals as its starting point and follows the actors in their media and social-historical contexts. Based on the concept of ‘journal poetics’ (Cf. IMAGE 1), this enables inductive work close to the source.Journal poetics focuses on the production side (poiesis): on the one hand, the compositional strategies of editors (and some editors) and publishers of journals, and on the other, the media-related poetics of the authors. Journal poetics thus refers to the totality of those factors that affect the scope and selection, structure and proportion, composition and arrangement of a journal. It results from the interplay of calculation, conception and contingency and is constituted in the alignment of producers and recipients. In addition, questions of materiality (typography, choice of paper, text arrangement, etc.) are integrated into the model. Journal poetics is thus a praxeological concept that is not based on rigid, declarative normativity, but on multi-actor processes and interdependencies in an increasingly complex literary field. With these factors in mind, a finely differentiated journal-poetic analysis matrix was developed to open up the black box of a journal and make the actors visible in their associations and interactions.
Through the project and the resulting publications, especially the monograph, I have shown a new way of researching the Age of Goethe. The theory and method can also be used for further journal research into other epochs.
In terms of methodology, my project draws on the recently flourishing international journal research and periodical studies as well as the latest studies on material formats of literature (Spoerhase). Network theories (Latour) combined with aspects of social history and literary sociology (Bourdieu, H. S. Becker, Reckwitz) also provided starting points for a decidedly praxeological approach: in addition to the material-philological and reception-aesthetic perspective of current journal research (DFG research group ‘Journal Literature’), my project takes the journals as its starting point and follows the actors in their media and social-historical contexts. Based on the concept of ‘journal poetics’ (Cf. IMAGE 1), this enables inductive work close to the source.Journal poetics focuses on the production side (poiesis): on the one hand, the compositional strategies of editors (and some editors) and publishers of journals, and on the other, the media-related poetics of the authors. Journal poetics thus refers to the totality of those factors that affect the scope and selection, structure and proportion, composition and arrangement of a journal. It results from the interplay of calculation, conception and contingency and is constituted in the alignment of producers and recipients. In addition, questions of materiality (typography, choice of paper, text arrangement, etc.) are integrated into the model. Journal poetics is thus a praxeological concept that is not based on rigid, declarative normativity, but on multi-actor processes and interdependencies in an increasingly complex literary field. With these factors in mind, a finely differentiated journal-poetic analysis matrix was developed to open up the black box of a journal and make the actors visible in their associations and interactions.
Through the project and the resulting publications, especially the monograph, I have shown a new way of researching the Age of Goethe. The theory and method can also be used for further journal research into other epochs.