Current Research

The Gift of Metamorphosis: Goethean Science in Modernity

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 an observational approach 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 in the twentieth-century interwar period. Such twentieth-century afterlives of Goethe's morphological thought are to be found not in the history of science, however, but rather in the methodological history of the humanities. This second book manuscript in progress examines four case studies: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Goethe on color theory;  Aby Warburg and Goethe on the life of images and anthropological aesthetics; André Jolles and Goethe on simple narrative forms such as legends, jokes, and riddles; and Alfred Schütz’s sociological reading of Goethe’s two novels of self-formation (Bildungsromane).

Born into quite wealthy families, all four thinkers were men of means, and all witnessed their world collapse in different ways. Two were German-Jewish intellectuals: Schütz was forced into Manhattan exile, while Warburg's idiosyncratic library was relocated from Hamburg to London. André Jolles, on the other hand, joined the National Socialist party and eventually worked for the SS intelligence agency (Sicherheitsdienst). Wittgenstein volunteered as a private soldier and later as a hospital porter on the side of the Allies. The divergent political paths on which they embarked crossed moral and national borderlines: Schütz and Wittgenstein were born in Austria, but by life's end were naturalized American or British citizens, respectively. Jolles, on the other hand, was deemed by the Americans "still a Nazi -- too old (71 years) to be arrested." However different their wartime trajectories and postwar fates, all four intellectuals returned to Goethe amid geopolitical upheaval and worldwide economic meltdown in order to invoke the synthetic powers of a thinker who could not help but find a salutary and holistic sense of unity even in the midst of crisis.

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.