Pretexts for Writing
Bucknell University Press,U.S. (Verlag)
978-1-68448-052-4 (ISBN)
Around 1800, print culture became a particularly rich source for metaphors about thinking as well as writing, nowhere more so than in the German tradition of Dichter und Denker. Goethe, Jean Paul, and Hegel (among many others) used the preface in order to reflect on the problems of writing itself, and its interpretation. If Sterne teaches us that a material book enables mind games as much as it gives expression to them, the Germans made these games more theoretical still. Weaving in authors from Antiquity to Agamben, Williams shows how European–and, above all, German–Romanticism was a watershed in the history of the preface. The playful, paradoxical strategies that Romantic writers invented are later played out in continental philosophy, and in post-Structuralist literature. The preface is a prompt for playful thinking with texts, as much as it is conventionally the prosaic product of such an exercise.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Seán M. Williams is a lecturer in German and European cultural history in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sheffield, UK, following an appointment as Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow. He was previously lecturer (“wissenschaftlicher Assistent”) in German and comparative literature at the University of Bern, Switzerland. He has publishedon German literature and philosophy around 1800, in comparative contexts.
Abbreviations ... v
A Note on Translations... vi
Introduction: What Prefaces Are Not: Pedantic Notes ... 1
Historical Context and Precedent
Paratextual Theory and Textual Autonomy
Rhetorical Caesura: Comprehending Romanticism
Writing to Write
1 Goethe: A Playful and Resistive Set of Preface Strategies ... 66
Zero Prefaces
Ambiguous Prefaces
Poetic Prefaces
Embedded Prefaces
Belated Prefaces
A Hypertrophic Preface
2 Jean Paul: Autoprefacing ... 144
Baroque Beginnings: The Preface as Brow, Morsel, and Porch
Reviewers and Readers
Writers and Preface-Writers
Prefatory Procrastination and Textual Foreplay
The Logic of Length; Or, Digressive Fragmentation
Countering Captatio Benevolentiae? Beyond Eloquence
Conclusion: Preface to Prefatorial Philosophy (and Theory)
3 Hegel: Prefatorial Polemic Becomes Philosophy ... 237
Starting with Sterne? Literature and Philosophy around 1800
Descriptive Induction versus Performative Prefacing
A New Style of Preface
Sublation of Conventional Prefatory Content
A Superior Preface
Philosophical and Rhetorical Preface Paradigms
Post-Structuralist Postscript
Conclusion... 311
Acknowledgements ... 328
Bibliography ... 330
Index ... 371
About the Author ... 372
| Erscheinungsdatum | 14.01.2019 |
|---|---|
| Reihe/Serie | New Studies in the Age of Goethe |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 152 x 229 mm |
| Themenwelt | Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Allgemeines / Lexika |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik | |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte | |
| ISBN-10 | 1-68448-052-3 / 1684480523 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-68448-052-4 / 9781684480524 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
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