At the end of the eighteenth century, new and diverging conceptions of time and temporality proliferated in German literature and culture. While accounts of human history by Herder and Kant upended traditional epistemologies of time, popular journals often featured reflections on ephemerality, the Zeitgeist, and the crises of the present moment. Recent German Studies scholarship has uncovered productive new approaches to notions of time around 1800, while itself critiquing established chronologies of literary and intellectual history, particularly those linked to notions of ephemerality, colonialism, and the Anthropocene. This session will supplement the two guaranteed Forum-sponsored panels on “From Anthropocene to Zeitgeist” by focusing more specifically on time and temporality in the literary and philosophical works of the canonical authors Goethe and Schiller. The three papers selected will perform nuanced close readings of concepts of temporality in Goethe and Schiller’s works, such as anticipation, timelessness, and determinate time. Their interventions challenge conventional understandings of Goethe and Schiller’s place in established timelines of literary and intellectual history.

The session will be moderated by Professor Julie Koser of the University of Maryland. The session will feature three papers of no more than 18 minutes each, thus allowing for at least 20-25 minutes of unstructured discussion at the end. The panel will feature a combination of scholars at different points in their careers (PhD candidate, postdoctoral fellow, and associate professor).

The panel will begin with Bryan Norton’s paper, “Goethe and the Technics of Antizipation,” which will explore Goethe’s use of the Kantian term Antizipation in his botanic writings from 1790. The paper centers on Goethe’s critique of Linnaeus: rather than using the term prolepsis, which Linnaeus employed to describe nature’s ability to progressively take on new forms within a fixed time frame, Goethe employs the word Antizipation in his interrogation of the temporality of Bildung. Norton’s paper will discuss the temporal forms of Antizipation in Goethe in relation to Kant and Linnaeus, with an eye to the ways in which the relationship between forms of thought and forms of nature is theorized as a distinctly temporal one, a relationship that is surprisingly negotiated by technical mediation. As Goethe’s critique of Linnaeus suggests, the speed of Bildung is variable, even manipulable through technē: it can be quickened or slowed through careful practical knowledge.

The role of temporality in Goethe’s poetic works is the focus of Dennis Schäfer’s paper, "Islanded in the Stream of Time: On Forgetting, Glück, and Timelessness in Goethe’s 'Mayfest.'" Schäfer’s essay is concentrated on a reading of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s acclaimed poem "Mayfest," in which he instantiates a loss of time or rather of temporal consciousness. Effectively, the poem’s central metaphors all circumscribe a day of everlasting sunlight as the poem’s primary Erlebnis (experience) unfolds, with rectilinear temporal progression suspended. As Schäfer argues, what charges the heightened natural experience in “Mayfest” and its mesmerizing blinding light are the forms of forgetting and Glück as best described by Friedrich Nietzsche in On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (1874). The speaker’s loss in a serene experience of love functions as an instance of forgetting and hence as a loss of temporal consciousness à la Nietzsche. Being, as it were, islanded in the stream of time, forgetting and the Glück that it expressly contains lever out any true relationship to the environment, even though it both induces and sustains Erlebnislyrik in the first place.

In the session’s final paper, entitled “Time as Tyranny: Schiller’s Quantum Escape Route Not Taken at the Dawn of the Anthropocene,” Sally Hatch Gray will analyze Friedrich Schiller’s reflections on time and his responses to Kant in his Aesthetic Letters (1795). As Gray argues, while Kant’s Newtonian-inspired epistemology demonstrates how humans process empirical experience by way of a priori categories of time and space, Schiller sees this as a threat to a world of possibilities and to freedom. If people are educated to believe that they can only perceive a structured nature through fixed, a priori categories, and through this process reach determinate truth, then they doom themselves to create such a reality and to live as instruments in an increasingly mechanized world. Schiller’s critique of this phenomenon sounds an alarm at the dawn of the industrial age and of the Anthropocene. Drawing on Karen Barad’s argument in Meeting the Universe Halfway, that “. . . neither space nor time exist as determinate givens outside of phenomena” (315), this presentation will illustrate how Schiller’s rejection of determinate time illuminates a road not taken, one that still resonates today.