Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Powers, Elizabeth

Titel

From Genre to Gender: On Goethe's 'Der Wandrer'

Ist Teil von

• Goethe yearbook, 2001, Vol.10 (1), p.31-49

Ort / Verlag

Rochester: North American Goethe Society

Erscheinungsjahr

2001

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION eBooks)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• [...]it might be said that the antagonism that originality bears toward its origins becomes part of the estate it bequeaths to its own, admittedly sterile, offspring. [...]in Goethe's succeeding work - as early as Werther and culminating in the opening of the last act of Faust - the idyll is always endangered by the struggle between the traditional natural order and the new order of innovation and self-expression. In his review, Goethe criticized Geßner's inclination to detail (" . . . und dann das Detail, wie bestimmt, Steine, Gräschen"). [...]while Gessner provides the details of a blisteringly hot day in Theocritian fashion - "Die Eidexe schlich lächzend im Farrenkraut am Weg, und die Grille und die Heuschrecke zwitscherten unter dem Schatten der Blätter im gesengeten Grase"- the heat is evoked much more sparingly by the wanderer ("Schwül ist schwül der Abend," 17) and the woman (" . . . willst du hier / Untern Pappelbaum dich setzen? /Hier ist kühl," 81-83). Yet, idealized as it is, contemporaries noted a resemblance to Lotte Buff. [...]not only are the woman in "Der Wandrer" and Lotte Buff poetically linked (see Goethe's May 1773 letter to Kestner on the inception of the poem), but so also are Werther's Lotte, the woman in "Der Wandrer," and the vision in the "Polnischer Jude" review. [...]in my reading, the effacement of the inscription to die goddess concerns not only die overturning but also die utter erasure of the "maternal" order of imitation in die eighteendi century.