David E. Wellbery

John B. Bender

Time belongs to a handful of categories (like form, symbol, cause) that are genuinely transdisciplinary. Time touches every dimension of our being, every object of our attention -- including attention itself. It therefore can belong to no single field of study. Of course, this universalist view of time is not itself universal but rather is a product of the modern age, an age that conceived of itself as the "new" time. Time has thus gained new importance as a theme of general research with the "post-modern turn" now manifest in many areas of intellectual endeavor, especially in the humanities and social sciences. "Chronotypes" are models or patterns through which time assumes practical or conceptual significance. Time is not given but (as the subtitle indicates) fabricated in an ongoing process. Chronotypes are themselves temporal and plural, constantly being made and remade at multiple individual, social, and cultural levels. They interact, they change over time, and they have histories, whose construal is itself an act of temporal construction. This book -- an interdisciplinary collaboration of philosophers, historians, literary critics, and anthropologists -- examines the ways individuals, societies, and cultures make sense of time by constructing it in diverse patterns.

The Construction of Time

Chronotypes

Nancy A. Kaiser

Essays in Honor of Peter Demetz

Traditions of Experiment from the Enlightenment to the Present

Helmut Müller-Sievers

Do literary texts provide distinctive access to the history of science? Is the study of literature based on scientific procedures? Is there a connection between scientific processes and literary forms? The essays in this collection show how literary and scientific texts from the late 18th to the late 19th centuries revolve around these questions. What emerges is a picture of the mutual dependence and the incalculable difference between literature and science in the period of their modern formation.

Essays on an Incalculable Difference

The Science of Literature

Kai Sina

So selbstverständlich uns der Begriff des ‚Spätwerks‘ in der allgemeinen Kommunikation über Literatur erscheint, so erstaunlich ist seine weitgehend unreflektierte, zumeist nur intuitive Verwendung im Bereich der Literaturwissenschaft. Dieses Buch fragt nach den Möglichkeiten einer möglichst trennscharfen Konturierung des Phänomens ‚Spätwerk‘. Dabei wird die verbreitete Verwendung des Begriffes als eine von außen herangetragene biographische oder epochale Orientierungsgröße überschritten, um so die ästhetischen Eigengesetzlichkeiten des Phänomens von innen zu erhellen. Als Erkundungsfeld bietet sich das Werk desjenigen Schriftstellers an, das für den im frühen 20. Jahrhundert aufkommenden Spätwerkdiskurs von richtungsweisender Bedeutung ist: das Werk Goethes. Hierfür spricht zudem ein charakteristisches Desiderat: Denn obwohl die Forschung der letzten sechzig Jahre das Goethe'sche Spätwerk in seinen komplexen Schreibweisen bereits weitgehend erschlossen hat, ist die Frage nach seiner Spätzeitlichkeit als einer poetischen Qualität bislang nur gestreift worden. Damit liefert dieses Buch einen problemorientierten Beitrag sowohl zur Goethe-Philologie wie auch zur Literaturwissenschaft im Allgemeinen.

Goethes Spätwerk / On Late Goethe

In a collection of essays on key events, works, themes, and other aspects of German literary history, the entries focus on particular literary works, events in the life of the authors, historical moments, pieces of music, technological innovations, and theatrical and cinematic premiers.

A New History of German Literature

No study of Goethe's early lyric poetry has been published in English in the last fifty years. But the reading of this poetry the author presents is not intended merely to introduce an English readership to a major body of work; rather, the book delineates for the first time in any language an account of the symbolic network or organizing myth that underlies Goethe's individual poems. This marks a decisive break with the previous research on Goethe, which has tended to view his poetry as the expression of occasional experiences. The author shows, on the contrary, that Goethe's lyric work circles around a core set of problems and figures, that it evinces a systematic coherence unperceived until now.

Goethe's Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism

The Specular Moment

The discipline of rhetoric - adapted through a wide range of reformulations to the specific requirements of Greek, Roman, Medieval, and Renaissance societies - dominated European education and discourse, whether public or private, for more than two thousand years. The end of classical rhetoric's domination was brought about by a combination of social and cultural transformations that occured between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Concurrent with the 'theory boom' of recent decades, rhetoric has appeared as a center of discussion in the humanities and social sciences. Rhetorical inquiry, as it is thought and practiced today, occurs in an interdisciplinary matrix that touches on philosophy, linguistics, communication studies, psychoanalysis, cognitive science, sociology, anthropology, and political theory. Rhetoric is now an area of study without accepted certainties, a territory not yet parceled into topical subdivisions, a mode of discourse that adheres to no fixed protocols. It is a noisy field in the cybernetic sense of the term: a fertile ground for creative innovation. This volume embodies the interdisciplinary character of rhetoric. The essays draw on wide-ranging conceptual resources, and combine historical, theoretical, and practical points of view. The contributors develop a variety of perspectives on the central concepts of rhetorical theory, on the work of some of its major proponents, and on the breaks and continuities of its history. The spectrum of thematic concern is broad, extending from the Greek polis to the multi-ethnic city of modern America, from Aristotle to poststructuralism, from questions of figural language to problems of persuasion and interaction. But a common interdisciplinary interest runs through all the essays: the effort to rethink rhetoric within the contemporary epistemological situation. In this sense, the book opens new possibilities for research within the human sciences.

David E. Wellbery

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