The 12^th International Conference of
	ISSEI	In cooperation With
	International Society for the Study of European Ideas

Section IV: Art, Theatre, Literature, Music, Culture

Workshop: Genetic Historicism and the Semiotic Fiction of Nationalism: Theories of Language and Race in Nineteenth-Century German Art and Literature

Chair: Sharon Worley

The German Romantic movement initiated a semiotic code in a variety of interrelated disciplines. Nationalistic in tenor, it established a political movement against Napoleonic tyranny and occupation. In terms of its complete permeation of German intellectual and cultural society by the time of the German Wars of Liberation (1812-13), the movement paralleled the French revolutionary movement to radically reorient society with a new set of social values and their corresponding semiotic symbols. Theories of symbols were formulated by both philosophers and critics, and applied by artists and writers to the corresponding body of art and literature. The elements of style were formed by a growing German Romantic lexicon of referents established in opposition to Neoclassicism, and founded in the unique characteristics of nationalism and modernism. When Friedrich Schlegel first described the characteristics of modern poetry he did so by insisting on its flexibility, its infinite quality, and its expansive modernity. At the same time that modernity suggested the mutable quality of art and language, and it formed a parallel with J.G. Herder’s theory in his essay, “On the Origin of Language,” in which the most elemental and primitive basis of language was a “dictionary of nature.” In his Outpourings of an Art Loving Friar (1797), W.H. Wackenroder wrote that nature and art are languages distinct from verbal language that are in touch with invisible forces. This was a common sentiment among the early Romantics, and a conclusion they arrived at through their explorations of art and poetry. In his Literary Notebooks (1797-1801), F. Schlegel reduced art to a mathematical symbol for pi where every Romantic artwork was equal to pi squared equal to critical poetry. The symbol π(2) was further the abbreviation for the poetry of poetry. At once original, primitive and modern, German Romanticism offered a symbolic form of communication that encoded a new nationalism with a set of historic and abstract referents. The characteristics of the Romantic movement thus established its emphasis on origins, and originality, but its most important nationalist referent lay in its establishment of a genetic historicist mode in contemporary patriotism. Nationalism followed and was inextricably linked to studies of German or Teutonic anthropology. The ethnic-anthropological theories of Herder in his Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784-91) were followed by nationalist patriotic propaganda written during the French occupation of Germany in which authors J.G. Fichte, F. Schlegel, Ernst Moritz Arndt and Adam Müller described the origins and unique characteristics of Germans. These ideas were also expressed in literature such as Heinrich von Kleist’s Hermannsschlacht (1809), or the Romantic medieval revival of the chivalric tale of the Niebelungenlied by the Schlegel brothers and others. The founding of the city of Cologne by the Roman governor of Gaul, Marcus Agrippa, established the boundaries of Teutonic territory as well as the first iconic symbol of the Romantic movement, Cologne and the later Gothic Cathedral of Cologne. Hermann’s (Arminius) victory over the Romans in 7 C.E. established the modern boundaries of Germany, and was revived as evidence of Teutonic racial purity by Herder and Fichte. Defining themselves in opposition to Roman civilization, and later Neoclassicism, not only described the unique characteristics of German Romanticism, but more importantly the potential to formulate a different language and culture; one that stressed cultural and German national unity. This session will address Romantic theories of race, language, and genetic historicism in Nineteenth-Century German art and literature.

Topics may address issues concerning Central Europe and German Nationalism within the broader European political arena of the 19^th Century and the areas of Art and Literature, including:

Science and Fiction

Art and National Identity

Evolution from Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants to Mendel’s Theory of Genetics, and Darwin’s Origin of the Species

Submit abstracts and proposals (250 words) to:

Sharon Worley

sharonworleyprof@cs.com

or

worleys@uhd.edu

Adjunct Prof. Art History,

University of Houston, Downtown

Houston, Texas, USA

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