Nature as (anti)-Nation: The Construction of Autonomous Space(s) in Bettina von Arnim’s Early Works. (original) (raw)

The sensitive apprehension of nature in Goethe and Humboldt

Paisagem e Ambiente, 2018

The paper seeks to interpret the concepts of nature and landscape in some of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt works. Of them, while nature would be considered all of the natural phenomena, landscape is a fragment of this totality, embodied by the experience of a constantly trained eye. Therefore, landscape, either for Goethe or for Humboldt, is formulated by the desire to present it according to the aesthetic dimension, to say, it would be necessary sensitivity and imagination in order to notice nature in its whole. At the beginning of the article, the goethean notion of nature and landscape is shown throwing light on some of his romances and scientific studies, such as The Sorrows of Young Werther, Novel or story of a hunt and Metamorphosis of Plants. Following, it is shown the humboldtian understanding about both categories assimilated by poetry and science. Finally, it is analyzed some affinities and differences between the poet and the Prussian naturalist.

Art, Nature and the Poesy of Plants in the Goethezeit

Sometime around 1800, towards the end of his period of programmatic neo-classicism, Goethe took time out from his official duties at the Weimar Court, and from his own scientific research, to compose a perfect Petrarchan sonnet addressed to the relationship between “art” and “nature.” While seemingly in flight from one another, we are told in the opening stanza, the apparent divergence of the entities thus named actually effects their unforeseen reunion: “Natur und Kunst, sie scheinen sich zu fliehen,/Und haben sich, eh man es denkt, gefunden.” Reassured by this realisation of the newfound unity of nature and art, the speaker declares that his antipathy (Widerwille) (whether to the one or the other or, perhaps, to their apparently antipathetical trajectories) has also disappeared, and he now finds himself seemingly drawn equally to both. This bold beginning begs a series of tricky questions that are only partially and indirectly answered in the following stanzas (on which, more anon). “Nature,” as Raymond Williams remarks in Keywords, is “perhaps the most complex word in the [English] language,” and, judging by the lengthy entry in Grimms’ Deutsches Wörterbuch, the same can certainly be said for Natur in German. One wonders, then, what conception and dimension of said “nature” is in play here? “Art” is a somewhat less multivalent term, but it was significantly more-so in Goethe’s day. While we tend to associate this word primarily with the sphere of aesthetic production, as in the creation of works of art, around 1800, Kunst, like art in English, could also refer to activities that would today be classified in terms of “craft.” Such crafty “arts” could also include the experimental techniques deployed by those who had adopted Sir Francis Bacon’s novum organon in order to induce “nature” to surrender “her” closely guarded secrets. What kind of “art” is this, then, that is seemingly so at odds with which “nature”? Why are they in flight from one another? And on what basis, and in what manner, might their apparent re-unification be understood to have been effected? In this article, I propose to explore these questions from an ecocritical and ecophilosophical perspective. In particular, I wish to reconsider German romantic-era understandings of the interrelationship of art and nature in relation to the burgeoning new field of multi- and inter-disciplinary study that became known in the 1980s as “biosemiotics,” entailing the examination of those multifarious and multifaceted communicative processes (semiosis) that are intrinsic to the existence and interactions of all living organisms (bios).

Nature and the Dark Pastoral in Goethe\u27s \u3cem\u3eWerther\u3c/em\u3e

2015

Celebrating the natural harmony of the stream, grasses, and the beautiful wellspring where the peasant girls come to fetch water in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774), Goethe’s eponymous hero embraces pastoral nature with a passion. He partakes in a traditional pastoral setting of rustic, idyllic landscapes rife with “simple” peasant folk, happy children, and agricultural pursuits far from the complexities of urban or courtly life—at least in the first part of the novel. This idealized pastoral framework with its peaceful green hills and valleys appears isolated from—or, more precisely, abstracted from—the urban sites where the authors of such poems and tales inevitably write and where, apparently, corrupted wealthy sophisticates rage political and economic battles. Yet according to ecocritic Terry Gifford, the pastoral trope is actually not so one-sided and simplistic; this literary form encompasses complex, often ironic tensions, including the prim...

The Cultural Enframing of Nature: Environmental Histories during the Early German Romantic Period

Environment and History, 2000

The introduction of histories of nature in the late eighteenth century posed the epistemological problem of how to bring the diversity of empirical laws into theoretical unity. Whilst Goethe and Humboldt argued for the possibility of objective histories of nature through modes of disciplined perception, Schelling emphasised the inevitable subjectivity of such histories and the impossibility of displaying visually or instrumentally the internal processes generating manifest forms. Each of these three figures used different technologies of representation to produce their environmental histories. But all three gave a central role to aesthetic judgment in representing their view of a unified history of nature.

"Nature in a Box: Ecocriticism, Goethe's Ironic Werther, and Unbalanced Nature"

ABSTRACT: “Nature in a Box: Ecocriticism, Goethe’s Ironic Werther, and Unbalanced Nature” Ecocriticism emphasizes how our bodily and ecological boundaries are just as porous, inter-penetrable, and open as are our cultural and linguistic realms. As individual bodies and communities, we are fully immersed in our material environment and participating in constant exchanges of matter and energy. In this essay, I nevertheless advocate for a cautious approach to the ecocritical question of contested boundaries. After all, some boundaries and membranes are necessary to maintain living organisms. Regarding Timothy Morton’s assertion that we are “radically open,” I note the need for stable and healthy membranes to sustain life, such as our porous yet enclosed intestines. I propose a multi-pronged perspective using the literary model of Goethe’s famously sentimental Werther, who longs to merge with nature and become an insect, in juxtaposition with his deeply ironic Triumph of Sentimentality, which satirizes the Werther-like figure, Prince Oronaro, who wants to keep nature safely in a box. From the relationship of these two texts emerges an “ironic Werther,” a model for ecocriticism. Werther’s and Morton’s “openness” are juxtaposed with Oronaro’s boxes, allowing for an open/closed perspective that resonates with “unbalanced nature” more broadly. Ecologically speaking, all boundaries fade in the long-term, cosmic view; yet short-term boundaries allow a steady-state existence far from equilibrium, that is, they allow life to exist. Nature’s long term unbalance brings change and evolution, even as short-term bodies live, reproduce, die, and continue the process. This essay rejects the notion of harmonious nature and proposes instead a dynamic, multi-pronged view both ironic and serious, both literary and scientific, both open and closed; above all, it suggests that thinking “nature in a box” might remind us that we, too, are nature and need some limits as we hubristically alter our world.

Nature and the “Dark Pastoral” in Goethe’s Werther

Goethe Yearbook, 2015

Introduction: The Dark Pastoral in Relation to Dark Ecology and the Anthropocene ELEBRATING THE NATURAL HARMONY of the stream, grasses, and the beautiful wellspring where the peasant girls come to fetch water in Die Leiden (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774), Goethe's eponymous hero embraces pastoral nature with a passion. He partakes in a traditional pastoral setting of rustic, idyllic landscapes rife with "simple" peasant folk, happy children, and agricultural pursuits far from the complexities of urban or courtly life-at least in the first part of the novel. This idealized pastoral framework with its peaceful green hills and valleys appears isolated from-or, more precisely, abstracted from-the urban sites where the authors of such poems and tales inevitably write and where, apparently, corrupted wealthy sophisticates rage political and economic battles. Yet according to ecocritic Terry Gifford, the pastoral trope is actually not so one-sided and simplistic; this literary form encompasses complex, often ironic tensions, including the primary oppositions between the (gritty) urban and the (garden-like) rural, between the always already lost "Golden Age" and a messier present time, between myth and history, and between an overtly artificial "utopia" and concrete "realism, " as well as the intentional acknowledgment that the green vision is hyperbolic yet precisely therefore able to provide a social critique through artifice. 1 Even the pastoral's common insistence on avoiding all mention of politics can function as a form of critique, with its utopian, conflict-free zone inevitably suggesting the opposite, much in the way that a utopia can describe a "no-place" that critiques what actually is. The pastoral tensions in these polarities resonate all the more powerfully because they cannot be bridged; their mythic nostalgia can reveal stark contrasts in social, political, chronological, and, most significantly for ecocriticism, ecological terms. However, the pastoral's capaciousness may not be broad enough to encompass the rupture documented in Goethe's novel through Werther's radical shift from a foundation of agrarian harmony to the unstable grounds of destructive storms and flooding. This shift parallels the text's move out of Werther's solipsistic letters and into a multiplicity of voices describing his downfall. One might thus abandon the pastoral's inherently dualistic artifice Goethe Yearbook XXII (2015)