The Study of German Romanticism in the Twenty-First Century

Author(s): Adrian Daub

Source: The German Quarterly , Summer 2016, Vol. 89, No. 3, FOCUS: Rereading
Romanticism (Summer 2016), pp. 347-349
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Association of Teachers of German

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24757614

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 FORUM: Romanticism 347

The Study of German Romanticism in the Twenty-First Century

To think about the study of German Romanticism after the year 2000 means to
think about Romanticism in the curious postregnum of "Theory" and in the age
of interdisciplinarity. It seems to me that what primarily characterizes the study
of Romanticism today, and did so for about two decades, is not what is done, but
what is not done. The shift in emphasis away from semiotic theories of Roman
ticism to approaches that foreground the history of science, the shift from psy
choanalytic takes on Romanticism to gender-theoretical ones have opened, or
re-opened, for discussion areas that critics in the poststructuralist mode had
tended to neglect, if not necessarily ignore. Similarly, topics that allow scholars
to combine and mix canons tend to find favor over the kind of inquiries that were
instead intended to deepen and refine national canons.
It is characteristic of the wider shift away from the heady days of the Theory
Wars, that none of these course adjustments necessarily entail an out-and-out
rejection of earlier positions. If they oppose anything about the kind of scholar
ship of Romanticism that dominated the scene in the 1980s and 90s, it is certain
ingrained tics of thought that were never central to poststructuralism's critical
project to begin with: the need to declare Romanticism a forerunner of certain
preferred strands of modernism (thinkofLacoue-Labarthe/Nancy's The Literary
Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism [1988]), or of certain
post-1945 philosophies; the tendency to caricature Enlightenment thought on
the one hand and "realism" on the other to reduce continuities of Romantic
thought with its predecessors and successors; the privileging of certain master
thinkers over the larger group, the forgotten or marginalized author (we might
think of Paul De Man and his students here). The title of Nicholas Halmi's Ge
nealogy of the Romantic Symbol (2008) is programmatic in this respect: Halmi re
turns to an ur-obsession of Romanticism studies of the 1970s and 80s, but embeds
the story of the symbol in detailed historical accounts of social function, emerging
institutions, scientific discourse, and shifting economic power.
One might call their approach the vindication of the surface. Poststructuralism,
media theory, Marxism tended to tell us that whatever Romanticism may have
seemed to have been about, something rather different was going on. The last
twenty years have instead chosen to more carefully attend to what Romantics
themselves claimed to put at the center of their enterprise. Ecocriticism doesn't
unlock any dimension of Romanticism that was somehow previously ignored, but
rather makes such a dimension eloquent in a new way. Likewise, queer readings
of Romanticism reactivate a dimension of sexual dissidence that was always an
acknowledged core of German Romanticism. And locating Romanticism in the
history of science as more than a blip of gleeful contrarianism allows us to inquire
into the genealogy of modern science beyond a simplistic "two cultures" division.

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348 The German Quarterly Summer 2016
Another general point seems to be that we've all become gradualists in telling
the story of Romanticism: shocking newness, absolutely unprecedented interven
tions, out-and-out revolutions of thought have become rarer (if not altogether
rare) in our accounts of Romanticism. This trend may well have started with the
interventions into the philosophical genealogy of Romanticism by Dieter Henrich,
Manfred Frank and their students: for every supposed radical break with the crit
ical philosophy and eighteenth-century epistemology, they produced a missing
link that scholars had conveniently repressed in order to accentuate the break "be
tween" late Enlightenment philosophy and Romanticism. Frederic Beiser has made
a cottage industry out of demolishing facile claims of unprecedented novelty, or
lone wolf-status for thinkers around 1800. Dalia Nassar's recent book The Roman

tic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy, 1795-1804
(2013) has made clear that even the question which strands of eighteenth-century
thought Romanticism is taken to respond to—whether, for instance, Romanticism
is to be understood as primarily concerned with metaphysics or with epistemol
ogy—is likely to produce a skewed and one-sided picture of Romanticism. The
kind of anticipatory skepticism that the 1980s and 90s so obsessively located in
early German Romanticism, and which so often could look like poststructuralism
avant la lettre, looks very different when one acknowledges that Romanticism un
derstood itself centrally as both epistemology and metaphysics.
Under Henrichs and Franks influence intellectual historians rewrote the story
of the genesis of Romanticism. Meanwhile, historians of science frayed its sup
posed end-point. Taking seriously the scientific stringency of Romanticism has
tended to commit scholars to deemphasize the break away from Romanticism that
for several generations of scholars had characterized the later nineteenth century.
Whether it is the Romantic origins of Darwinism, Marxism, or the modern re
search university; the break that was thought to occur between the Schlegels and
Heine, between Hegel and Darwin has undergone a thorough rethinking—as has
the supposed chasm that separates Romantic approaches to science from those of
the late eighteenth century. Robert J. Richards pioneered this line of inquiry almost
twenty years ago, but since, studies like Jocelyn Holland's German Romanticism
and Science: The Procreative Poetics of Goethe, Novalis, and Ritter (2009), LeifWeath
erby's Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz
and Marx (2016), and Stefani Engelstein's forthcoming book on Sibling Logic all
remap the location of Romanticism in the modern history of science in this vein,
joining similar texts dealing with British Romantic science ranging from Denise
Gigante's Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (2014) via the work of Alan
Richardson, to Jon Klancher's recent Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences (2013).
The story I am presenting here applies above all to departments of literature
and philosophy. The story in art history and above all music looks different, partly
because theory with a capital "T" figured differently into their intellectual devel
opment. But, and this seems to me crucial, the story looks less different today
than it did in, say, the year 2000. Ecomusicology, media studies, and new mate
rialisms in music departments have unfolded largely parallel with their cognates

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 FORUM: Romanticism 349

in literary studies, while the New Musicology of the 1980s was characterized by
a sense of its own belatedness. Benedict Taylor's Mendelssohn, Time and Memory:
The Romantic Conception of Cyclic Form (2011) and Gundula Kreuzers article on
"Wagner-Dampf: Steam in Der Ring des Nibelungen and Operatic Production"
(in: The Opera Quarterly 27.2-3 [2011]: 179-218), to name just two recent ex
amples, combine new scholarly approaches and an understanding of the intellec
tual project of Romanticism that closely mirrors those to be found in the books
by literary scholars, historians, and philosophers mentioned earlier. If this is a
new age of interdisciplinary research in the study of German Romanticism, as in
other fields, this field is better positioned than most others to inquire into the
genealogy of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity themselves. The main site for
interrogation of institutional politics that the study of Romanticism may thus
have to confront is the question of interdisciplinarity.
To be sure: all the developments I have traced here have been made possible
by the new interdisciplinarity. Today, studying EichendorfF in distinction from
Beethoven, Ritter, Friedrich, and Savigny would strike us as examples of a silo
mentality. But we are all too aware that the new enthusiasm for interdisciplinarity
is not a product of some spontaneous upwellings of Spirit—it has to do with the
realignment, and in many respects the fraying, of the institutions produced in and
through Romantic thought. So, while studies of Romanticism have benefitted
greatly from the current emphasis on interdisciplinarity, many scholars have also
explored the Romantic origins of our current ideology of interdisciplinarity. Re
cent efforts of Clifford Siskin and William Warner in This is Enlightenment
(2010) to do something similar for the Enlightenment, and Stefani Engelstein's
deft interrogation of the precise understanding of genealogy that underpins our
picture of disciplines, has pointed to the direction in which a critique of this kind
can go. Interdisciplinarity will continue to open up new opportunities for the
study of Romanticism—but it doesn't mean the field shouldn't bite the hand that
feeds it.
Adrian Daub
Stanford University

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