The proposed panel responds to both current and past scholarly discussion about the German cultural engagement with this dynamic relation between nature and reality, from Richard Brinkmann’s seminal study of literary realism (Wirklichkeit und Illusion [Reality and Illusion], 1957) to the recent work of Sabine Wilke (U Washington), Simon Richter (U Pennsylvania), and Eva Horn (U Vienna) on eco-critical approaches to literary analysis and the Anthropocene within the German sphere. Across this multivalent and vibrant body of discourse, the 19th century has consistently held a central and decisive place, and the proposed panel represents the newest contributions to scholarship in this domain.
Each presentation will last 20 minutes or less, allowing for up to 30 minutes of open discussion in the latter part of the session.
Professor Pierre-Héli Monot will begin by looking to the beginning of the 19th century, when German writers and philosophers from the Romantic movement such as Herder, Schlegel, and Schleiermacher understood the act of interpretation to be at the center of the relation between nature and reality. More specifically, Professor Monot will draw from his recent monograph Mensch als Methode: allgemeine Hermeneutik und partielle Demokratie [Man as Method: General Hermeneutics and Partial Democracy] (Heidelberg UP, 2016) in order to discuss how the Romantics conceptualized the two human practices of agriculture and hermeneutics as cultural acts in which both ethnic and philological capital are coupled and, in turn, distributed. Professor Monot’s paper will argue that critical engagements with 19th-century German literature should pay attention to how the tropes of manual and philological labor enabled Romantic writers to think of the “real” and “nature” as co-existing in a very particular way: namely, the “real” is that which can only be extracted from nature through the act of interpretation. This first presentation will therefore illuminate the roots of a discursive paradigm that would become decisive for the remainder of the century—both as an epistemic foundation and as an object of fierce re-evaluation.
Picking up from this point, Michael Watzka will explore how in the middle of the 19th century the relationship between nature and reality began to be approached in a new way: not simply on the level of subjective understanding and cognition, but also within the sphere of narrative and poïesis. In particular, Watzka will consider the writings of Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868) and the formal role that teichoscopy plays in them via the motif of the telescope. Watzka will suggest that Stifter's texts, through their unity of time, place and plot, employ (tele)media in order to reflect their own spatio-temporal boundaries. Ultimately, Watzka will argue that Stifter's focus on natural settings in a period of massive technological acceleration can be read as a reaction to a newly chaotic experience of time and reality produced by technology’s ability to create a sense of “synchronization” in the human subject. This reading will allow Watzka to ask how Stifter’s concept of reality complies with a function of literature that Adam Barrows described as to "spatially conceptualize temporal experience [and to] intervene meaningfully in the problems of mediating between locality and globality, place-based and planetary existence."
Dr. Natalie Moser will conclude the panel with a glance to the latter half of the 19th century, and specifically to Theodor Fontane’s travel writings (1862−1889). In his text Jenseit des Tweed [Beyond the River Tweed], Fontane describes impressive landscapes in the mode of romantic travel reports and presents the history and the stories of these landscapes in the style of historical novels modeled after Walter Scott. Dr. Moser will argue that the form of Jenseit des Tweed—especially its episodic structure and techniques of montage—bears directly upon its reflections about reality and the representability of nature. After tracing the formal and motivic dimensions of the text, Dr. Moser will then demonstrate how Fontane’s understanding of reality can be seen to develop through his subsequent travel writings. The paper will end by discussing Fontane's status as a “modern realist” by looking at how he portrays the impact of technological innovations (such as the railway) upon natural landscapes.
The course of the panel will thus reveal how by the end of the German 19th century, the Romantic conception of subjective understanding has been left behind as the chief arena for thinking through the relationship between nature and the real. From the middle of the century onwards, it is narrative and journalistic writing that have become the frameworks of choice. At the same time, however, the mode and attitude of these writings nevertheless “romanticize” the natural world and express concern about how to define reality in ways that hearken back to the beginning of the century.
This dialectical arc of the German understanding of how the natural and the real interpenetrate offers a concise and timely point of comparison with the ways in which this same relation is conceptualized within our own cultural moment. Nature and reality are no longer things that we simply meditate upon or tell stories about, but objects of social change and political discourse that we now acknowledge as finite. In this way, while the German 19th century may not provide final or comforting answers for how this relationship will unfold in the future, it does present a clear set of questions that we must continue to ask in the present. The proposed panel aims to do precisely this.