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Invoking Goethe's name has become fashionable again. With new methods and technologies of reading threatening to render literature virtual and insubstantial, we have the sense that "Goethe's ghosts" - the otherwise neglected voices and traditions that, finding their most trenchant expression in Goethe, inform the Western storehouse of literature - can show us long-forgotten dimensions of literature. Inspired by the distinguished Goethe scholar Jane Brown, whose life's work has called attention to the allegorical modes haunting the mimetic forms that dominate modern literature, the contributors to this volume take a rich variety of approaches to Goethe: cultural studies, history of the book, semiotics, deconstruction, colonial studies, feminism, childhood studies, and eco-criticism. The persistence, omnipresence, and modalities of the "ghosts" they find suggest that more than influence or standards is at issue here. Goethe's work informs current debates on nineteenth-century nationalism, while his Faust increasingly serves to express contemporary culture's anxiety about new technologies. The stubborn reappearance of these revenants testifies to more fundamental issues concerning the status of literature and the task of the reader. As the contributors demonstrate, these questions acquire renewed urgency in writers as diverse as Hegel, Adorno, Benn, Droste-Hülshoff, and Nietzsche. Each of the essays testifies to the enduring salience and presence of Goethe. Contributors: Helmut Ammerlahn, Benjamin Bennett, Richard Block, Dieter Borchmeyer, Franz-Josef Deiters, Richard T. Gray, Martha B. Helfer, Meredith Lee, Clark Muenzer, Andrew Piper, Simon Richter, Jürgen Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Patricia Simpson, Robert Tobin, David Wellbery, Sabine Wilke. Simon Richter is Professor of German Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Richard Block is Associate Professor of German at the University of Washington Introduction: ghosts and the machine: reading with Jane Brown / Richard Block and Simon Richter -- Egologies: Goethe, entoptics, and the instruments of writing life / Andrew Piper -- Goethe's haunted architectural idea / Clark Muenzer -- "Über allen Gipfeln": the poem as hieroglyph / Benjamin Bennett -- Goethe's Hauskapelle and sacred choral music / Meredith Lee -- From haunting visions to revealing (self- )reflections: the Goethean hero between subject and object / Hellmut Ammerlahn -- Mephisto: or the spirit of laughter / Dieter Borchmeyer -- Shipwreck with spectators: ideologies of observation in Goethe's Faust II / Richard T. Gray -- Constructing the nation: Volk, Kulturnation, and eros in Faust / Robert Deam Tobin -- Gretchen's ghosts: Goethe, Adorno, and the literature of refuge / Patricia Anne Simpson -- "I'll burn my books": Faust(s), magic, media / Peter J. Schwartz -- The imagination of freedom: Goethe and Hegel as contemporaries / David E. Wellberry -- Effacement vs. exposure of the poetic act: philosophy and literature as producers of history (Hegel vs. Goethe) / Franz-Josef Deiters -- Toward an environmental aesthetics: depicting nature in the age of Goethe / Sabine Wilke -- "Ein heimlich Ding": the self as object in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff / Martha B. Helfer -- "Ja, Goethe über alles und immer": Benn's double life in his letters to F.W. Oelze (1932-1956) / Jürgen Schröder -- Bibliography of Jane K. Brown's publications
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