Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Baumeister, Anna-Lisa

Titel

Herder's Kritische Wälder: A Vegetal Topography of Critique

Ist Teil von

• Literatur für Leser, 2017-01, Vol.40 (2), p.127-138

Ort / Verlag

Peter Lang GmbH

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Johann Gottfried Herder's Kritische Wälder [Critical Forests] capture the project of literary critique in an apparent oxymoron. The title of the essay compilation (containing altogether four diminutive forests or Wäldchen) features vegetative life [Wälder] alongside discourse [Kritik], which, in the eighteenth century as much as today, is generally regarded as the opposite of what is "natural." Against readings that understand Herder's vegetal poetological metaphors as essentialist "fictions"104 of immediate cultural production, I argue that Herder's Kritische Wälder (1769) enact a materialist meta-theory of literary criticism that is modeled after the organizational form of the forest, in conversation with eighteenth-century Forstbotanik. Herder's notion of Kritische Wälder challenges the paradigm of the critic as "weeder" prevalent in eighteenth-century hermeneutics, whose task it is to cultivate a critical literary discourse through the removal of improper readings. The Wälder, in contrast, envision Kritik as an interdependent cycle of productive overgrowth, accumulation, and decay, Zufall being the condition of its vitality. Taking Herder's model of Kritik as a central case in point, my reading relates the shift from philological to speculative criticism around 1800 to concurrent developments in Forstbotanik. I show how Herder responds to central questions of the Forstbotanik of his era, suggesting, as he does, that forests are functioning systems. On a different level, my argument also contributes to the histories of genius and the organic work of art, illustrating intersubjective and materialist facets of the concepts. I make my argument, first, by situating Herder's Kritische Wälder in the context of visions of the proper forest in eighteenth-century Forstbotanik and hermeneutics and, second, by highlighting the concrete composition of Herder's text as a collection and recycling of discarded materials from former projects.