Goethe as Woman: The Undoing of Literature

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Wayne State University Press, 2001 - 274 Seiten
A new approach to understanding Goethe that offers fresh insights into some of his most important works. The most celebrated of German poets, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is today as much an institution as a writer. This innovative study shows unexpected relations between Goethe the artist and Goethe the posthumous tradition, and considers the radical historical metamorphosis of his textual being. Drawing on a lifetime of reading and reflecting on Goethe, Benjamin Bennett focuses on that writer's own struggle with the idea of reading, and with an understanding of the wrongness of literature that opens onto the possibility of woman as a needful destabilizing factot. Bennett shows that even in his early writing Goethe exhibits a highly developed theoretical resistance against both the aesthetic and the national aspects of what was understood as literature in his time, an attitude that would lead him to experiment with gender difference as a means of staking out new literary positions. Bennett revlews a number of Goethe's works, offering a bold new interpretation of Werther, fresh insights into Die naturliche Tochter, and an assessment of Die Wahlverwandtschaften that reveals Goethe

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Inhalt

Acknowledgments
9
Reading in the Aesthetic Sense
23
Double Perspective and the Game of Life
43
Egmont as a Politician
63
The Three Versions
83
Lottes Name and Lottes Body
107
Gender
125
Goethe and the Future of Literature
149
Nietzsche as Woman
179
Goethe and the Possibility of a Feminist Literary Project
205
Goethe as Woman
251
Notes
257
Index
269
Urheberrecht

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