Goethe's Talking Books: Print Culture and the Problem of Literary Orality

Summary

OVER THE PAST TWO DECADES, there has been an upswing in scholarship on literary orality in the long eighteenth century, focusing in particular on the recitation and declamation of poetry. Much of this research takes as its starting point the reassessment of the “ear” and a related concern with the “tones” of language in Herder and Klopstock's poetics. In an analysis of Klopstock's 1774 Gelehrtenrepublik (The Republic of Letters), Karl-Heinz Göttert summarizes this shift:

Nicht das—aufklärerische—Auge, sondern das Ohr wird das entscheidende Organ der sinnlichen Wahrnehmung, und nicht auf die “körperliche” Unterstützung der Sprache z.B. durch hohe oder tiefe Stimmlage kommt es an, sondern der Ton hat ein eigenes Leben, deren Zeichenhaftigkeit gerade keinen Regeln folgt.

Not the—Enlightened—eye, but rather the ear becomes the decisive organ of sensual perception; at stake here is not the “physical” supporting of language, for example, by pitching the voice high or low, but rather tone has its own life, whose semiotic character does not follow any rules.

As Göttert and others have shown, the revaluation of the ear in the eighteenth century was by no means limited to poetological theory, but also provided the impetus for a wide spectrum of acoustic performance and composition practices, which, in turn, inspired thousands of pages of commentary in instructional handbooks, journals, and correspondences. In his 2004 monograph Ins Ohr geschrieben. Lyrik als akustische Kunst von 1750 bis 1800 (Written Into the Ear. Lyric Poetry as Acoustic Art from 1750 to 1800), Joh. Nikolaus Schneider draws on this enormous wealth of primary source material to show how the acoustic dimensions of language informed the composition and reception of German-language lyric poetry from 1750 to 1800. Meanwhile, the impact of popular literary reading practices around 1800 has been central to my own research as well as that of scholars such as Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus, Hans-Joachim Jakob, and Martin Danneck. For example, Meyer-Kalkus's Geschichte der literarischen Vortragskunst (History of Literary Elocution, 2020) integrates popular practices of literary declamation and recitation into a broader history of oral reading that encompasses the reading practices of Goethe, Tieck, and Kleist.