THE PURPOSE OF THIS SPECIAL SECTION—originally conceived as a series of panels sponsored by the Goethe Society of North America and held at the 2007 German Studies Association Meeting in San Diego—is necessarily more modest and less sweeping that its title may suggest. Its central research question is Goethe's impact and influence upon twentieth-century “theory,” with that term being broadly understood to encompass not simply literary theory but also philosophy (at least in its continental, in this particular case German, manifestations). An explicit aim of the panels was deliberately to avoid readings of Goethe's works according to various theoretical paradigms. An extensive examination of the twentieth-century German (not Anglophone) reception history of Goethe's works, including some but not all of the theoretical dimensions of this reception, has already been undertaken by Karl Robert Mandelkow in the second volume of his Goethe in Deutschland: Rezeptionsgeschichte eines Klassikers.

Unlike the approach of Mandelkow, these panels aimed to explore not how Goethe was interpreted by, but rather how he shaped twentieth-century theoretical discourses. It soon became clear, however, that the question of Goethe's impact on theory cannot be separated from his reception through it, since these two questions constitute two sides of the same coin. Nonetheless, the predominant emphasis here is on impact and influence rather than on reception.