Project Details
Projekt
Time and Form on the Move: Goethe's Morphology and its aftermath in the 20th century
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Eva Geulen
Subject Area
German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
Term
from 2013 to 2017
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 244374870
Since 2009, my research interest has been a new interpretation of Goethe’s morphology whose idea of form is to be reconstructed on the basis of the modes of presentation and the organizational logic of his periodical notebooks “On Morphology” and adjacent texts. However, the planned monograph “>From the Life of Form I: Goethe’s Morphology” was originally conceived in two parts. In the second part, the newly interpreted morphology was to be analyzed in its effects in the 20th century, with the aim to correct the received picture of Goethe’s science as a holistic and vitalistic response to modern experiences of crisis, furthermore, to prove Goethe’s compatibility with modern theories of form (E. Cassirer, G. Simmel, W. Benjamin) and, finally, on that basis to begin to question the validity of the caesuras ‘1800’ and ‘1900’. In contradistinction to the well researched manifest history of Goethe-reception, latent processes of a constitutively dynamic and ambiguous notion of form are at issue in this other reception. What is present in Goethe’s morphology when viewed as a medium of (re)presentation – a temporalized notion of form not subject to E. Cassirer’s distinction between functional and substantive concepts – re-emerges after 1900 and has not been sufficiently dealt with to this day. For this project of a new approach to the reception of morphology the SPP offers a congenial context in which the implication of this project can be fruitfully pursued in an interdisciplinary context genuinely akin to my own interests. Whereas the first part on Goethe has been begun and will be concluded by myself in 2014, the second part which requires additional research as well as a fertile context is subject to this application. With Dr. Alexandra Heimes and Dr. Eva Axer I have been able to secure two young and excellently suited colleagues for my project “From the Life of Form II: The Reception of Morphology in the 20th Century”.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
