• On Goethe
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On Goethe

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On Goethe contains the full range of Walter Benjamin's reflections on the central figure in modern German culture. The writings in this volume—newly translated, fully annotated, and framed by an ex...
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  • 29 April 2025
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On Goethe contains the full range of Walter Benjamin's reflections on the central figure in modern German culture. The writings in this volume—newly translated, fully annotated, and framed by an extensive introduction—display a variety of styles and cover a vast array of topics. The collection revolves around two strikingly different essays. Whereas "Goethe's Elective Affinities" develops a theory of critique in which a work is illuminated wholly from within itself, an article Benjamin wrote on Goethe for the Soviet Encyclopedia represents his first large-scale attempt to elaborate a historical-materialist methodology. The other thirty translations stand in similarly productive tension with one another. Some are concerned with concepts of beauty and categories of the aesthetic, others with the relation of art to politics and the status of "classical authors" in contemporary culture, and still others with what remains of humanistic traditions in the wake of their disappearance under fascist regimes and what synthesis is required for the construction of a historical object. The volume provides a glimpse into the laboratory of Benjamin's thought, while granting readers a series of insights into the epochal phenomena that gather around the name "Goethe."

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Price: $30.00
Pages: 382
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Imprint: Stanford University Press
Series: Cultural Memory in the Present
Publication Date: 29 April 2025
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781503642225
Format: Paperback
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"Throughout his career, Benjamin pondered the secret of Goethe's genius. The answers he gave in this scrupulously edited volume illuminate not only the legacy of Germany's most eminent literary figure, but also its unexpected impact on its greatest critic." —Martin Jay, author of Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School Under Pressure
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German Jewish philosopher. Susan Bernstein is Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies, Brown University. Peter Fenves is Joan and Serapta Harrison Professor of Literature, Northwestern University. Kevin McLaughlin is George Hazard Crooker Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and German Studies, Brown University.
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Note on Translation
Introduction by Peter Fenves
Part I
1. A Remark on Gundolf: Goethe
2. On a Lost Conclusion to the Note on the Symbolic in Cognition
3. Supplements To: On the Symbolic in Cognition
4. Early Romantic Theory of Art and Goethe
5. Life Built Up from the Elements
6. Purity and Rigor Are Categories of the Work
7. Notes toward a Work on the Idea of Beauty
8. Categories of Aesthetics
9. On "Semblance
10. Beauty
11. Beauty and Semblance
12. Truth and Truths / Cognition and Cognitions
13. Theory of Art Critique
14. The More Powerfully the Expressionless Comes Forth in Poetry
15. The Sacramental Also Turns into the Mythic
16. With Reference to Fran.ois-Poncet
17. Concerning Elective Affinities
18. Goethe's Elective Affinities
Part II
19. Goethe
20. Goethe's Politics and View of Nature
21. Weimar
22. Two Dreams of Goethe's House
23. Goethe's Theory of Colors
24. Against a Masterpiece: On Max Kommerell, The Poet as Fhrer in German Classicism
25. One Hundred Years of Writing on Goethe
26. Faust in the Sample Case
27. Books on Goethe—but Welcome Ones
28. New Literature about Goethe
29. Popularity as a Problem: On Hermann Schneider, Schiller's Work and Legacy
30. Letters about, to, and from Goethe
31. Mythic Anxiety in Goethe
32. Two Notes from the Arcades Project Books by and about Goethe in "Registry of Readings
Further Readings
Guide to Names
Glossary
Notes
Index of Goethe Citations (English-German
Name Index
Note on the Translators