Canonical Pressures: German Literature and its Voices of Difference

This special issue critically examines German Studies’ canonical narratives and assumptions about German literature.¹ We argue that texts from the traditional German literary canon should be closely re-read by focusing on voices that express linguistic, queer, racial, religious, sexual, and other forms of difference. This issue aims to urge continual critical rethinking of canonical interpretations of German literature in order to be aware of the history of mishearing, distorting, or silencing voices of difference within its literary canonical constructions. The traditional German canon addressed by the contributors includes texts from the Sturm und Drang, the German Enlightenment, the Goethezeit, German Romanticism, German Realism, and Dada and the avant-garde. The authors examine how these canonical texts juxtapose voices of difference from different perspectives. Each article provides case studies, with Kirk Wetters’ working methodology, to investigate the diverse concepts, practices, and discursive strategies used in literature labeled as “German” to render inaudible and illegible voices of difference that destabilize, discomfort, and decenter canonical narratives by scholars of German literature.

Within the past five years, two major responses have been proposed to deal with the conservativism and dominance of canonicity. One is to forego the canon by including “neglected voices in [one’s] classes rather than adhere to the literary canon.”² While the strategy is a much-needed corrective to the homogeneity of syllabi which uncritically include those at the center of the long-established canon, it overlooks that neglected voices are already in the literary canon. Ignoring the critical examination of these silenced voices inscribed in the canon only further entrenches the notion of a border between the so-called periphery and the center of the discipline. Addressing the canon’s excluded voices as marginal thus inadvertently affirms the gravity of the problem of monolingual and monocultural canonicity of German Studies.

The second response is to create a “counter canon.” Most notably, Sybille Berg proposed 2018 a counter canon with works solely by women to contribute to a “freundlicheren Miteinander in der Welt,” suggesting that the classical German literary canon, constituted primarily by German men, was unfriendly to women.³ Indeed, the canon as we know it has a “reassuring affective valence that such canonical anchors bring to some, but not to most,”as David Gramling has observed.⁴ But this response risks duplicating the canonical formation that it seeks to counter by producing a narrative of inclusion that must necessarily rely on moments of exclusion as well. As a result, the existent male-dominated canon is even more insidiously reinforced.⁵ What is required, then, are close re-readings of this traditional literary canon that can decenter it by presenting the diversity of voices within the canon itself.

The analyses collected in this issue show how even the texts at the center of the standard canon of German literature operate as a linguistically and culturally diverse site. The texts are fissured and shot through with difference, borrowings, and adaptation from non-German sources. German literature is replete with voices that resist and challenge assimilation into a canonical order. We continue the conversation begun in The Germanic Review’s “Displaced Philologies” special theme issue about the “multiple origins,” such as the multilingual aspects of German literature, as “national literature can never fully expel the other.”⁶ While “Displaced Philologies” examined strategies to expose and challenge methodological forms of exclusion by way of displacement by the humanities, this issue looks at how literature, when examined closely, shows that attempts to canonize and domesticate the voices of difference prove unstable. Derived from the Greek kanōn, “canon” indicates a straight rule that could provide a guideline, standard, and ideal measure.⁷ It also refers to texts authorized as sacred by the church for doctrinal use. “Voices of difference” expose canonical texts and their reception as conflicted sites of critical contention. The exposure of the instability of canonizing the voices of difference is what we call “canonical pressures.” The explicit or coded exposure of the failure of canonical structures is shown to dissolve through these readings. The impetus for this special issue is to demonstrate how texts with canonical status reveal their intrinsic anti-canonical pull upon closer reading. Canonical pressures occur in a contact zone between the German canon and the voices of difference, as the former tries to contain, appropriate, discipline, and domesticate them while seeking to distill them into text. Some voices are resisted and interrupted; in other cases, narrators and literary characters might be open to listening to their differences.⁸

Wetters’ contribution, “Sources and Methods: Theory of Canon and the Possibilities of Disciplinary Practice in German Studies,” opens this issue with a discussion providing conceptual clarity to the critical distinction between “canonical,” which he defines as the “the supposedly stable functions of legitimate or illegitimate authority,” and “canonic,” which evokes the “specific forms of critical self-reflexivity required in academic contexts” of the canonical. He works out the challenges of the “canonic design” of German Studies and why its canonics are relatively undertheorized and undefined. Such a lack of a clear self-definition provides flexibility for the discipline but also poses a challenge when asked to define itself in relation to various “disciplinary-canonic architectures.” His reflection provides a framework for the other articles’ case studies as steps toward theorizing self-reflexive canonics of German Studies.

In “A Performance for Everyone? Othering and the Politics of Language in J.M.R. Lenz’s Die Soldaten (1776),” Mary Helen Dupree sheds light on the discomfort surrounding the Jewish character of Aaron in the play. He is excluded and mocked in various ways by the others in the play, all Gentile characters, and his language serves as a “stumbling block” for many modern readers due to his use of Yiddish. Dupree analyzes how his voice of difference is marked as noisy, foreign, excessive, and abject in the play to the point that even in a recent English translation, his lines were left untranslated. She ultimately argues for scholarship on the Sturm und Drang to interrogate its problematic investments in the German canon.

In his discussion of “living script” in Jerusalem oder über religiöse Macht und Judentum, Moses Mendelssohn quoted his translation of the opening of Psalm 19 from the Hebrew Bible rather than quoting what was expected, Luther’s translation, the most canonical work of the German language at the time. In “Mendelssohn’s Upending of Canonical Appropriation,” Willi Goetschel argues that, with this subtle move, Mendelssohn liberates the voice in this psalm—that of King David’s—from the “pressures of canonical appropriation,” offering the reader an opportunity to listen for the difference in the interstice between the German Christian and Jewish readings. The article introduces a subversive rather than “classical” Mendelssohn, who finds strategies to upend canonical appropriation with his voice of difference, allowing us to productively rethink listening, difference, and diversity through his writings.

Friedrich Hölderlin responded to the pressure of the canon, in his case, the Ancient Greek literary canon, not by trying to replicate it or replace it with a new one but by rethinking the nature of the canon, as Anthony Curtis Adler argues through his reading of the final version of Hyperion in “Hölderlin’s Heraclitean Canon.” Through Hyperion’s interpretation of Heraclitus, which was mediated to him through the voice of Diotima, Hölderlin conceived of the canon not as a “fixed body of texts organized around a static guiding rule” but rather a dynamic and productive site of conflicting voices and a musical rather than visually oriented concept of the canon.

In “A Reading of Friedrich Kittler’s Reading of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s ‘Der Goldene Topf’ (The Golden Pot) in Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (Discourse Networks 1800/1900),” I demonstrate how Kittler’s readings of canonical German literature dismissed and distorted foreign voices that resisted his rigid theoretical framework. The limitations of Kittler’s theoretical approach are most evident in his readings of the snake-woman Serpentina and her sisters’ subversive voices in Hoffmann’s text. Kittler’s explicit claim to render obsolete the idea of canonicity in German literature and his flamboyant disruptions of disciplinary norms mask his affiliation with canonization processes.

The ocularcentricism and cis-heteronormativity that often drive canonical formations are made explicit in Forrest Finch’s reading of the protagonist Florio’s socialization into norms of masculinity in Joseph von Eichendorff’s novella “Das Marmorbild.” The characters around Florio attempt to teach him how to articulate and inhabit heteronormative sexual desires through, for example, viewing tableaux vivants of idealized women. Through these strategies to align Florio into the canonical order, they attempt to mute his queer voice of difference.

A Goethe who identifies with the marginalized and insecure condition of refugees is undoubtedly not the monumental and authoritative Goethe as implemented in the canonical narratives of the Age of Goethe. Daniel Purdy’s article, “World Literature and Defeat,” gives us a new perspective on Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur and his engagement with non-European texts as in his Orientalist Nachdichtungen by underscoring how his writings and ideas were “formulated in compensation for the shock of military defeat, political collapse, and foreign occupation.” This shock and destabilization of national defeat, Purdy argues, led to him rediscovering his identity through an “anti-hegemonic mode of reading” foreign literature, although such a Goethe was erased in his appropriation into the nineteenth and early twentieth-century canon.

In “Stifter’s Natives and Wandering Exotica: The Circulating Canons of ‘Die Narrenburg’,” Catriona Macleod uncovers differences and alterity in the text’s self-enclosed world through a wealth of “intertwined figurations of native and exotic plants” bearing track marks of trade routes for colonial exploration. These plants are not passive and mute but rather are actively intervening in the various framings within the narrative as well as even the medial format in which it appears, a florilegium, a “textual generator of multiple voices and differences” before the text appeared as a now canonical novel. The article focuses on Chelion, the “gypsy” wife of Jodok from the Himalayas whose alterity is dealt with by her “transformational whitening” in the narrative, a “process of unvoicing, of passive vegetalization,” equated with lilies, a case study of a canonical pressure on the European home and the poetic space of the novella.

André Flicker’s article, “Dada Historiography; or, How to End One’s Work?” discusses the tension in the work of Dada artists concerning the problem of canonization. On the one hand, they defined Dada as “nothing,” and their works revolted against the bourgeois art establishment as well as the process by which this establishment canonized artists and art movements. Nevertheless, the urge to claim their history was of keen concern for Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hugo Ball, and Raoul Hausmann to fulfill the aims of their project. The article carefully examines how these artists worked within the constraints of historiography, the institutional means by which canons and legacies were disseminated and transformed into a venue for their “nonsense.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tanvi Solanki

Tanvi Solanki is Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Yonsei University’s Underwood International College. A guiding concern of her work is to develop critical methodologies for investigating the role of sound in concepts and practices of difference, diversity, and alterity within the German literary and philosophical canon.

Notes

1 Earlier versions of the papers were presented at the Annual Toronto German Studies Symposium in 2022 entitled “Canonical Pressures: German Literature and its Voices of Difference.” The co-organizers Tanvi Solanki and Willi Goetschel wish to thank the DAAD with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office (AA) and the German Department at the University of Toronto for their generous support.

2 Renata Fuchs, “Digital Media Network Projects: Classroom Inclusivity Through a Symphilosophical Approach,” in Diversity and Decolonization in German Studies, ed. Regina Criser and Ervin Malakaj (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 215.

3 See https://diekanon.org.

4 David Gramling, “Dear Incoming Graduate Student Colleague,” in Criser and Malakaj, Diversity, 18.

5 See Hanna Engelmeier, “Bemerkungen zur jüngsten Kanon-Debatte,” Merkur 73 (2019): 85–92.

6 Willi Goetschel and David Suchoff, “Displaced Philologies,” The Germanic Review 93.1 (2018): 1–6, here 1–2. Till Dembeck has provided compelling evidence to the multilingual aspects of German philology, and in fact the most canonical work of German literature, Goethe’s Faust is an instance of multilingual philology in Till Dembeck, “Multilingual Philology and Monolingual Faust: Theoretical Perspectives and a Reading of Goethe’s Drama,” German Studies Review 41.3 (2018): 567–88.

7 James Diggle, Bruce L. Fraser, Patrick James, Oliver B. Simkin, Alexandra A. Thompson, and Simon J. Westripp, eds., The Cambridge Greek Lexicon, vol. 2 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 743.

8 For an elaboration of “listening to difference” as theory and practice, see Tanvi Solanki, “Listening to Difference: Herder’s Aural Theory of Cultural Diversity in ‘The Treatise on the Origin of Language’ (1772),” History of European Ideas 48.7 (2022): 930–47.