Simon Richter

Before the sixteenth century, no one had seen the Greek statue, the Laocoon, since antiquity, but popular aesthetic judgment insisted that it was an ideal work of art, the unapproachable model for imitation and aspiration. When in 1506 a vintner found the statue just outside Rome, the contradiction between the ideal and the reality was readily apparent; the statue depicted not a vision of beauty, but the representation of a body in pain. Since the eighteenth century, the Laocoon has been at the crux of German aesthetics. Laocoon's Body and the Aesthetics of Pain examines the writings of Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Moritz, and Goethe, and seeks to discover what drew these theorists of classical beauty to the statue's representation of pain. The book examines the contradictions in and between their respective understandings of the Laocoon. Taking his cue from the original texts, Richter sets the primary aesthetic discourse against the foil of the unexpected discourse networks. His reading of Winckelmann unfolds against the eighteenth-century culture of castrati. He shows Herder and Goethe winning important insights from the physiological experiments of Albrecht von Haller. In every case, the fundamental dichotomy of pain and beauty is shown to lie at the heart of both the statue and the discourse that concerns it. Richter argues that the relation of pain and beauty is crucial to the various versions of classical aesthetics that were developed in the last half of the eighteenth century. According to the author, there is no question that the Laocoon statue represents a body in pain. Nor is there any reason to decide if the Laocoon is a beautiful work of art. The single important fact is that eighteenth-century Germans since Winckelmann theorized the statue as beautiful and, in the course of their thinking, were obliged to deal with the question of pain in one way or another, even if by some strategy of avoidance. Richter's thesis is that the classical aesthetics of beauty is at the same time, and even more, an aesthetics of pain. Simon Richter is an assistant professor of German at the University of Maryland at College Park. A Ph.D. from the John Hopkins University, his articles, reviews and translations have appeared in such journals as The Lessing Yearbook, South Atlantic Review, Germanic Review, and SubStance.

Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Moritz, Goethe

Laocoon's Body and the Aesthetics of Pain

James Hardin

New essays providing an account of the shaping beliefs, preoccupations, motifs, and values of Weimar Classicism.

The Literature of Weimar Classicism

The Lola film is a distinct subgenre of the woman's film in which woman's claim to pleasure is entertained without recourse to the figure of the femme fatale. Lola embodies a recognizable set of characteristics through which over time a select group of directors, actors, and audiences have responded in ways that do not succumb to the imperatives of gender. There are over thirty-five Lola films, starting with Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel: many are German, others are French, American, British, Italian, and Spanish, but her claim has also resonated in Argentina, China, Egypt, Mexico, Thailand, and the Philippines. Lola can be working class, lesbian, transgender, ethnic, suburban, or any combination. This book examines Lola as a specific and enduring aspect of the early twentieth-century "new woman": woman's forthright claim to pleasure on her own terms, liberated, if only as a cinematic fantasy, from the usual constraints of sex and gender.

What Lolas Want

Women, Pleasure, Film

Daniel Purdy

Martha Helfer

New, interdisciplinary essays on an array of topics ranging from Goethe and mineralogy to theories of masculinity around 1800.

Goethe Yearbook

Martha B. Helfer

Essays on the Wilhelm Meister novels, Faust, Goethe's early plays, Schiller's Räuber and on Goethe's thought in relation to current debates on cosmopolitanism and postcoloniality.

Goethe Yearbook 13

Eighteen new articles on the works of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit, along with the customary book review section.

Goethe Yearbook 11

Richard A. Block

New essays from leading Goethe scholars providing testimony to the continuing, even renewed, relevance of Goethe for literary studies today.

Reading and the Persistence of Literature

Goethe's Ghosts

The cult of the female breast in contemporary American and European society is as pervasive as it is notorious. Our current fascination merely updates a long-standing obsession with the breast, which over the past twenty years has also become a subject of scholarly attention. Most historians and cultural theorists have focused on England and France, with virtually all research starting from the simple assumption that the breast is a signifier of the feminine and the female. With Missing the Breast, Simon Richter uses the texts of Enlightenment-era Germany to challenge that assumption, engaging instead the complexity of culturally constructed notions of the breast. Using the tools of medicine, literary theory, psychology, psychoanalysis, and etymology, Richter probes the breast-related fantasies underlying German culture and literature in the second half of the eighteenth century. His study reveals that, whereas in England and France and in the public imagination generally, the breast has been associated with the feminine and with abundance, the inherent �logic of the breast� in German culture unexpectedly pushes the breast toward masculinity and lack. Richter�s tour de force of textual and cultural analysis brings together the work of important German poets, writers, and dramatists, as well as major psychoanalysts and their critics, and writers and artists of the English-speaking world, to explore the tension between the plenitude of the breast and the implications of its absence. His engaging study draws the reader ineluctably toward a revolutionary possibility: the breast as an �unruly and uncontainable signifier,� the equal and more of what Lacan called the phallus. Missing the Breast will be an indispensable addition to the libraries of those interested in German textual studies, the history of sexuality, and theories of psychoanalysis. Its groundbreaking perspective will make a significant contribution to the fields of literary studies, gender studies, and women�s studies.

Simon Richter

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