Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction—Ghosts and the Machine: Reading with Jane Brown
- Part I The Ghosts of Goethe's Past
- Part II The Ghost That Keeps on Giving
- 6 Mephisto or the Spirit of Laughter
- 7 Shipwreck with Spectators: Ideologies of Observation in Goethe's Faust II
- 8 Constructing the Nation: Volk, Kulturnation, and Eros in Faust
- 9 Gretchen's Ghosts: Goethe, Adorno, and the Literature of Refuge
- 10 “I'll burn my books!”: Faust(s), Magic, Media
- Part III Spirited Encounters
- Bibliography of Jane K. Brown's Publications
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
9 - Gretchen's Ghosts: Goethe, Adorno, and the Literature of Refuge
from Part II - The Ghost That Keeps on Giving
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction—Ghosts and the Machine: Reading with Jane Brown
- Part I The Ghosts of Goethe's Past
- Part II The Ghost That Keeps on Giving
- 6 Mephisto or the Spirit of Laughter
- 7 Shipwreck with Spectators: Ideologies of Observation in Goethe's Faust II
- 8 Constructing the Nation: Volk, Kulturnation, and Eros in Faust
- 9 Gretchen's Ghosts: Goethe, Adorno, and the Literature of Refuge
- 10 “I'll burn my books!”: Faust(s), Magic, Media
- Part III Spirited Encounters
- Bibliography of Jane K. Brown's Publications
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
Throughout her distinguished career, Jane Brown has evolved a theory of allegory derived in no small part from the persistent prominence of Goethe's literary works in her critical imagination. From her consideration of allegory as an essentially pictorial trope to her extended analysis of the imperative to rethink the place of allegory, in a relationship of productive tension with mimesis, Brown identifies allegory as a dominant mode in the European tradition of cultural representation, which encompasses the general argument of her 1992 study, The Persistence of Allegory. In contrast to the emergence of theoretical models of allegory derived from early German Romanticism, Paul de Man's Allegories of Reading and Timothy Bahti's Allegories of History foremost among them, Brown reads allegory as the foundational trope of European drama, determined by a transhistorical negotiation with neoclassicism. Allegory, both in its most technical rhetorical and popularized definitions, refracts the central question of cultural representation through the lens of referentiality: How can the unrepresentable be represented? As Brown demonstrates in her morphological (in Goethe's sense) approach to more than three centuries of European drama and some forms of visual culture, the answer to that question must be differentiated with attention to national, cultural, and temporal specificity, though the same problem underwrites the attempts.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Goethe's GhostsReading and the Persistence of Literature, pp. 168 - 185Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013