Current Research

The Gift of Metamorphosis: Goethe’s Poetic Science of Form

How does a plant metamorphose over time, in the flush of blossom even becoming utterly unrecognizable as what it once was and yet remaining identical to itself? How does a ritual practice unfold its formal potential from the ancient Saturnalia to the Roman carnival Goethe himself viewed in 1787 and later rediscovered in festivities held in post-Napoleonic Cologne? And how should one conceptualize the manner in which the epic genre recalibrated its formal conventions from Homer to Ariosto and on to Goethe himself, metamorphosing within varying cultural contexts? Goethe saw these as distinct, but affine questions, and he developed a method known as morphology to make sense of them. Whether investigating natural life-forms, social forms of practice, or literary forms, Goethean morphology continually remains attuned to the question of how formal identity persists not despite, but precisely because of self-transformation in light of novel environmental, historical, or cultural contexts.

The study demonstrates that morphology emerged as a structured ensemble of observational practices that found fruitful application across several domains beyond nature. I show that morphology shaped the emerging field of literary-historical study and trace its influence, in particular, on the linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt’s critical work and the comparatist A. W. Schlegel’s literary histories. Beyond the ‘Age of Goethe,’ the study tracks the afterlives of morphological concepts in key twentieth-century methodological debates in the humanities.

The Poetics of Sensation in the Modern Lyric

This project expands on recent work on concepts of literary form by posing anew a fundamental question of poetics: how does poetic language – in its audible sounds, its visual layout, its tactile choreography of tongue, lips, and teeth in enunciation – performatively evoke the human senses? Five case studies approach this question, each one correlating a modern poet to one of the human sensory channels (e.g., “Sight” and Stefan George’s typographic experiments, “Touch” and Paul Celan’s articulatory gestures, or “Sound” and Rilke’s phonetic patterning). More than a series of thematically grouped close readings, each case study asks how key poets responded to the reconfiguration of the human sensorium brought about by modernization (e.g., technological media, noise pollution, acceleration). The book’s ultimate aim is to give an account of purportedly ‘symbolist’ and ‘hermetic’ poems that overcomes their classification as variants of a poésie pure. Instead, I interpret this set of modern poets as seeking to recuperate the incarnational character of poetic speech in a modern lifeworld increasingly rendered abstract and ‘disenchanted.’ In addition to literary historical reevaluation, the study hopes to productively wed more traditional methods used to read non-arbitrary linguistic signs (e.g., iconicity) with approaches to the phenomenology of embodiment. This methodological synthesis does not exclude historicization, but rather furnishes a conceptual infrastructure for approaching poetic language as a seismographic registration of, and response to, historical shifts impacting how humans sense.