From Goethe To Gide: Feminism, Aesthetics and the Literary Canon in France and Germany, 1770-1936

274 Pages·2005·1.77 MB·English

by  Mary Orr

Goethe
Rousseau
From Goethe
This book brings together specially commissioned essays
on twelve canonical male writers from the later
Enlightenment to the beginnings of Modernism – six F Schilletor Gide
r
French and six German. o
m

Working with the tools of feminist criticism, leading G Stendhal
o
specialists in Britain and North America demonstrate how
e
feminist readings of key works by Rousseau, Goethe, t Feminism, Aesthetics
h
Schiller, Hoffmann, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, e Baudelaire

Heine, Fontane, Zola, Kafka, Gide illuminate far more t and the French
o
than attitudes to women. The volume raises fundamental G
aesthetic questions regarding creativity, genre, realism i and German Literary
d
and canonicity and shows how feminist criticism can e Eta Hoffmann
Canon 1770–1936
revitalize debate on these much-read writers. It therefore
foregrounds the major authors who shaped the dominant
aesthetics, philosophy and bourgeois culture of European
Flaubert
literature between 1770 and 1936.
Heine
Zola
Orr and
Sharpe
Fontane
ISBN 0-85989-722-2 edited by Mary Orr and Lesley Sharpe
Kafka
ISBN 0 85989 722 2 Gide
UNIVERSITY OF EXETER PRESS
www.exeterpress.co.uk 9 780859 897228
From Goethe to Gide
Feminism, Aesthetics and the
French and German Literary Canon
1770–1936
This collection of essaysprovides amajorreassessmentof thoseliteraryfigures
from the later Enlightenment to the beginnings of Modernism who are most
studied on FrenchandGermancourses in Britainand aroundtheworldtoday.
By investigating the works of these canonical maleFrench and German writers
through the optic of feminist criticism, the contributors lay bare some of the
fundamental aesthetic questions raised by these works: the function of art and
of the artist; the limits of Realism; the relation of gender and genre. Readers
new to French and German can study one author in depth or engage in
comparative analysis, while specialists will find much to stimulate their critical
thinking.
Editors: Mary Orr is Professor of French at the University of Southampton.
Lesley Sharpe is Professor of German at the University of Exeter. Both have
published major monographs on canonical writers of French and German
literatureaswellasworkingonwomenwritersandfeministcriticism.MaryOrr
is one of the General Editors of Forum for Modern Language Studies and Lesley
Sharpewasforsix yearsGermanicEditoroftheModernLanguageReview.

From Goethe to Gide
Feminism, Aesthetics and the
French and German Literary Canon
1770–1936
edited by
Mary Orr and Lesley Sharpe
Firstpublishedin2005by
UniversityofExeterPress
Reed Hall, StreathamDrive
ExeterEX44QR
UK
www.exeterpress.co.uk
©MaryOrr,LesleySharpeandtheindividualcontributors2005
TherightofMaryOrrandLesley Sharpetobeidentifiedasauthors
ofthisworkhasbeenassertedbythemin accordance
withtheCopyright,DesignsandPatentsAct1988.
British LibraryCataloguing in Publication Data
Acataloguerecordforthisbookisavailable
fromtheBritishLibrary.
HardbackISBN0859897214
PaperbackISBN0859897222
Typesetin10½/13ptPlantinLight
byKestrelData,Exeter,Devon
PrintedinGreatBritainby
AthenæumPressLtd,Gateshead
Contents
Preface vii
List of Contributors ix
Introduction 1
1 Errant Strivings: Goethe, Faust and the Feminist Reader 7
Gail K. Hart
2 Hospitality and Sexual Difference in Rousseau’s Confessions 22
Judith Still
3 Gender and Genre: Schiller’s Drama and Aesthetics 34
Lesley Sharpe
4 Male Foibles, Female Critique and Narrative Capriciousness:
On the Function of Gender in Conceptions of Art and
Subjectivity in E.T.A. Hoffmann 49
Ricarda Schmidt
5 Varieties of Female Agency in Stendhal 65
Ann Jefferson
6 Heine’s ‘Mädchen und Frauen’: Women and Emancipation
in the Writings of Heinrich Heine 80
Robert C. Holub
7 Mundus Muliebris: Baudelaire’s World of Women 97
Rosemary Lloyd
8 Flaubert’s Cautionary Tales and the Art of the Absolute 113
Mary Orr
9 Manly Men and Womanly Women: Aesthetics and Gender
in Fontane’s Effi Briest and Der Stechlin 129
Patricia Howe
10 Bodies in Crisis: Zola, Gender, and the Dilemmas of History 145
Jann Matlock
11 Karl Rossmann, or the Boy who Wouldn’t Grow Up: The
Flight from Manhood in Kafka’s Der Verschollene 168
Elizabeth Boa
12 André Gide and the Making of the Perfect Child 184
Naomi Segal
Postscript 199
Notes 205
Bibliography of Secondary Literature
1. General Works 236
2. Works on Specific Authors 240
Index 256
Preface
The twelve essays in this volume are designed to stimulate debate on
what we the editors consider a vital issue in contemporary criticism: the
extent and value of the contribution of feminist criticism to scholarly
analysis of canonical male writers and the potential of such criticism to
enrich and diversify scholarly debates in the future. The project was
born of our sense of the need to take stock of the impact of an
enormously varied and sometimes incompatible set of feminist critical
approaches that had often been only sporadically applied to major
canonical writers in the French and German traditions. These
approaches and their interpretative possibilities had, moreover, often
been marginalized in mainstream critical debate. In harnessing the rich
critical tools of feminist criticism and by foregrounding its usefulness,
our aim was also to demonstrate the increasing sophistication of
those approaches and hence their potential to probe not only received
interpretations of canonical texts but also the aesthetic assumptions
underpinning them and their reception. Our hope is that the essays in
this volume will encourage further dialogue within feminist criticism
and, by demonstrating that criticism’s flexibility and productiveness,
help in questioning assumptions about the formation of literary values
and traditions.
All the contributors to the volume are experts in their fields. They
present original work and an immense background of accumulated
scholarly expertise in a manner accessible to the undergraduate and yet
challenging to the specialist. All would have liked more space for notes
in order to indicate where further material on their subject could be
vii
From Goetheto Gide
found. Our solution to the problem of length was to restrict full
bibliographical references in the notes to each chapter to the secondary
literature whose arguments were specifically alluded to, and to refer
readers by author to additional titles listed in full in the bibliography at
the end of the volume. In this way the notes to each chapter provide a
compact source of references for those, particularly students, who want
to read further on specific texts, while the main bibliography has
become an extensive, and we hope useful, research tool for those
engaged in longer-term scholarly work in these fields. Those interested
in applying feminist critical methods to other canons will also find
useful pointers in the bibliography.
We are immensely grateful to our contributors for their participation
in this project, which involved not only producing the essays in this
volume but also taking part in a two-day conference in November 2003
that gave us a very necessary opportunity to exchange ideas and
approaches. We should like to acknowledge the generous support of the
British Academy, which gave us a British Conference Grant of £2,000
towards the cost of bringing our US contributors to the UK for this
event. We should also like to thank the Institute of Romance Studies
and the Institute of Germanic Studies (at that time still separate
institutes in the University of London’s School of Advanced Studies)
for providing two excellent venues for the conference and for their
administrative support. Julie Crocker of the School of Modern
Languages at the University of Exeter lent her computing skills to the
task of formatting the chapters and bibliography, and the School also
provided for the services of an indexer. Finally, we are grateful to the
University of Exeter Press for the confidence they have shown in the
project and the practical advice and professional support they have
given us throughout.
Mary Orr
Lesley Sharpe
Exeter, December 2004
viii
Contributors
Elizabeth Boa is Emeritus Professor of German, University of
Nottingham. Her publications include The Sexual Circus: Wedekind’s
Theatre of Subversion (Blackwell, 1987), Kafka: Gender, Class, Race in the
Letters and Fictions (OUP, 1996), ‘Die Geschichte der O oder die
(Ohn-)Macht der Frauen. Die Wahlverwandtschaften im Kontext des
Geschlechterdiskurses um 1800’, Goethe-Jahrbuch 118 (2001).
Gail K. Hart is Professor of German at the University of California,
Irvine, where she also directs the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program.
She has published books on Gottfried Keller’s fiction and on German
bourgeoistragedyand articleson Germanand comparative literature ofthe
eighteenth and nineteenth century. Her new book, Friedrich Schiller: Crime,
Aesthetics, and thePoetics of Punishment, appeared in 2005.
Robert C. Holub teaches in the German Department at the University of
California at Berkeley. He has written numerous books and essays in the
area of eighteenth- to twentieth-century literary, cultural, and intellectual
history. His current research deals with Friedrich Nietzsche, situating his
writings in the context of nineteenth-century scientific, social and political
discourses.
Patricia Howe is Senior Lecturer in German at Queen Mary College,
University of London.Herresearchinterestsarenarrativefictionand travel
writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She has written
on Fontane, Saar, Storm, Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler, and on women
writers.
Ann Jefferson is Fellow and Tutor in French at New College, Oxford.
Her publications include Reading Realism in Stendhal (CUP, 1988). She
is currently working on a project entitled ‘Writing Lives and Making
Literature in France: 1750 to the present’.
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