Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Special Section on Goethe's Lyric Poetry
- Introduction: New Approaches to Goethe's Lyric Poetry
- Intimacy, Morality, and the Inner Problematic of the Lyric
- Beyond the Poem: Strategies of Metapoetic Reflection in Goethe's Erster Weimarer Gedichtsammlung
- Meistersänger als Beruf: The Maieutics of Poetic Vocation in “Erklärung eines alten Holzschnittes …”
- Song or Narration?: Goethe's Mignon
- The Sucking Subject: Structural Ambiguities of Goethe's “Auf dem See” in Literary and Linguistic Perspective
- “Höhere Begattung,” “höhere Schönheit”: Goethe's Homoerotic Poem “Selige Sehnsucht”
- Poetry after Faust
- Forms of Knowledge/Knowledge of Forms: The Epistemology of Goethe's West-östlicher Divan and Cavellian Skepticism
- Im flüßgen Element bin und wieder schweifen: Development and Return in Goethe's Poetry and Hegel's Philosophy
- Goethe's Historical Particularism and the “Right Hand” of History: Early Modern State Building, Nobility, and the Feud in Götz von Berlichingen
- Where Are the Mountains?: Johann Jacob Bodmer and the “Pre-Kantian Sublime”
- The Politics of Aesthetic Humanism: Schiller's German Idea of Freedom
- Romanticism's Old German as Stepping-Stone to Goethe's World Literature
- Book Reviews
Poetry after Faust
from Special Section on Goethe's Lyric Poetry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Special Section on Goethe's Lyric Poetry
- Introduction: New Approaches to Goethe's Lyric Poetry
- Intimacy, Morality, and the Inner Problematic of the Lyric
- Beyond the Poem: Strategies of Metapoetic Reflection in Goethe's Erster Weimarer Gedichtsammlung
- Meistersänger als Beruf: The Maieutics of Poetic Vocation in “Erklärung eines alten Holzschnittes …”
- Song or Narration?: Goethe's Mignon
- The Sucking Subject: Structural Ambiguities of Goethe's “Auf dem See” in Literary and Linguistic Perspective
- “Höhere Begattung,” “höhere Schönheit”: Goethe's Homoerotic Poem “Selige Sehnsucht”
- Poetry after Faust
- Forms of Knowledge/Knowledge of Forms: The Epistemology of Goethe's West-östlicher Divan and Cavellian Skepticism
- Im flüßgen Element bin und wieder schweifen: Development and Return in Goethe's Poetry and Hegel's Philosophy
- Goethe's Historical Particularism and the “Right Hand” of History: Early Modern State Building, Nobility, and the Feud in Götz von Berlichingen
- Where Are the Mountains?: Johann Jacob Bodmer and the “Pre-Kantian Sublime”
- The Politics of Aesthetic Humanism: Schiller's German Idea of Freedom
- Romanticism's Old German as Stepping-Stone to Goethe's World Literature
- Book Reviews
Summary
FAUST CHANGES EVERYTHING. To say that it calls into question the very idea of poetic genres is to state the obvious. In this respect it belongs to the same general historical movement as the realistic novel; and it certainly shares with the novel what Bakhtin calls the latter's “heteroglot” quality, its rejection of the general poetic preference for a maximally “unitary” language. But on the other hand, Faust is definitely neither itself a kind of novel nor an instance of the “novelization” (in Bakhtin's sense) of some other literary type. In fact it can reasonably be regarded as antithetical to the novel, insofar as it exhibits a resistance to the medium of the printed book. Novels take to the culture and exigencies of printed books like fish to water, whereas poetry—given that it can never shake off at least a shadow of its historical affiliation with musical performance—is never entirely comfortable on the printed page. And in contexts that involve an opposition between poetry and the novel, I think we may expect to find Faust on the side of poetry—an expectation that is of course gestured at by the fact that practically all of Faust is in verse. But the relation between Faust and the print medium has a dimension that goes far beyond whatever musicality might be attributed to its form.
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- Information
- Goethe Yearbook 20 , pp. 133 - 146Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013