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Published in 2015, Caroline Levine’s book Forms challenged traditional binaries of form and context and offered a new set of categories for thinking through the relationship of art to political and social life: whole, rhythm, hierarchy, and network. Recent interdisciplinary scholarship in our field has called attention to a multitude of phenomena around 1800 that resonate with these categories and also challenge the form/context binary, e.g., salons and sociability networks, knowledge circulation, genre and gender, political hierarchies in Weimar and beyond, relationships between human and non-human bodies, and the doubling of literary and scientific meanings of “forms” such as the Urpflanze. Drawing on Levine’s understanding of “forms,” this panel focuses on the “whole” in the period around 1800.

The first paper, Deniz’s “Sounding Stones and Embodying Tones,” examines Jean Paul’s Vorschule der Ästhetik (1804) as a critique of both “poetic materialists” and “poetic nihilists.” Whereas the materialist has dead matter but no form, the nihilist has form yet no matter at all. This paper argues that Jean Paul develops his idea of poetic “inner matter,” which is capable of building its own form, not as a mere alternative to those schools as usually thought, but mainly to challenge Goethe’s plastic form that can indeed elevate “external mechanical matter” to poetic matter. It first examines how Jean Paul furthers this distinction by evoking the acoustic phenomenon of “natural sound” produced by different media. Next, Deniz turns to Jean Paul’s novel Titan (1800-03) to show how these contrasting approaches are juxtaposed as different “organizing principles” in a text (Levine 2015). For instance, in some landscape scenes, otherwise passive and isolated materials are arranged in such a way as to represent nature as an organic whole. In other scenes, the ethereal sound of the Aeolian harp, like an active agent, produces immersive soundscapes effecting the way the protagonist Albano experiences nature, environment, and his relationship with his beloved, Liane. Furthermore, the meteorological “pattern” (high or low wind) which is reflected in the vibration-frequency of the strings can be traceable to the forces stimulated in Albano’s inner world. However, Aeolian harp’s unpredictable, irregular, and unrepeatable sonic quality gives rise to, unlike Levine claims, singular, rather than “rhythmic,” occurrences in the narrative.

In Carranza’s “Ritual Deformations: Goethe’s “Roman Carnival” and the Life of Social Practices,” he notes that Goethe’s “Schicksal der Handschrift” invites the reader to see nature, art, and society as three domains, each evincing a unique kind of formative lawfulness (Gesetzmäßigkeit) open to uniquely transformative disruption: natural forms of life, aesthetic and literary forms, and, finally, social forms of practice. Beyond the domain of natural life-forms, Goethe brought his morphological tools of observation to bear on forms of social practice in his pioneering ethnographic account of the Roman carnival. The talk will reconstruct this migration of morphological method into the societal domain by focusing on the conclusion of Goethe’s “Das Römische Carneval” (1789). Goethe’s imaginative sympathy with the carnival stands in stark contrast to the largely negative depiction of dangerous mass formations in his literary works, such as the Walpurgisnacht scenes or the unregulated crowds of refugees forming “das Gedränge” in Hermann und Dorothea.

In the third and final paper, Schutjer’s “Swamp Encounters: Epigrammatic Form in Goethe’s Venetian Epigrams,” she explores how a particular poetic genre, the epigram, serves Goethe as a dynamic poetic ur-form, one deeply tied to the development of his morphological thought generally in his post-Italy period. In particular, she consider how the epigram organizes experience in the ever-shifting liminal realm of mud, sea, and city in Goethe’s Venetian Epigrams. Goethe was alert to the ancient function of the epigram as an inscription on monuments; indeed his earliest epigrammatic distichs were intended as such in Weimar and elsewhere. “Es werden bald die Steine zu reden anfangen,” he wrote to Knebel. In the VE, then, Goethe employs the genre to explore original scenes and relationships of poetic production. Venice serves as a kind of primordial soup, a “Pfuhl,” out of which life emerges and into which it decays. The city’s liminality cuts in many ways throughout the cycle, placing wives and prostitutes, poets and charlatans, humans and animals in proximity to each other. The delicate encounter limned by the poetic epigram is constantly refigured through a chain of analogies and correlates. The paper concludes with a consideration of the epigram devoted to the young acrobat “Bettine” and her public performance.

This panel concludes with ample time for discussion of “Goethe’s Forms” and the impact of Levine’s work on the field.