Introduction to Special Section “Movement”: Movement and the Modern

Summary

THE ESSAYS IN this section explore the dialectic of movement and stasis that plays out in the literature and thought of the Goethezeit. These contributions stem from a series of panels on the topic organized by the MLA Forum on Late 18th- and Early 19th-Century German Literature for the 2021 MLA convention. They open up a dialogue about how movement functions to reflect and shape emerging social, aesthetic, affective, temporal, and political concepts in the period.

Movement and stillness stand at the center of Lessing's argument about the superior flexibility of poetry over the plastic arts in his Laocoon (1766); his interpretation of the Laocoon statue rests upon the “pregnant moment” in which movement is frozen. Poetry and drama, in contrast, are liberated from the more rigid representational strictures applied to the visual arts because of the arbitrary and transitory nature of words. It is the movement of words that continually feeds our imagination. As Susan Gustafson reminds us in her essay in this section on the Wilhelm Meister novels, Lessing connects movement to aesthetic pleasure: “Reiz ist Schönheit in Bewegung” (Charm is beauty in motion). In this sense, Lessing's aesthetic program deviates from Winckelmann's neoclassical fetishization of Greek statuary and is predicated on aesthetic effect. Lessing's embrace of movement drives the privileging of poetry and drama over sculpture and painting in his semiotic treatise. A few decades later, Hegel reprises this aesthetic value system in his Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (Lectures on Aesthetics, 1835–38), situating the static art of statuary at the beginning of a genealogy of aesthetics that culminates in poetry, drama and, eventually, the end of art. The movement and evolution so central to his aesthetic and ethical project delineate a development from the motionless “schwere Materie” (heavy matter) of statues to the lightness and transitoriness (“die innere Lebendigkeit”) (inner life) of poetry. Dialectical thought is, to be sure, predicated on constant movement, and movement is thereby perceived as a product of the present and the future. The concepts of Bildung and Steigerung (progression), so important for Goethe and his contemporaries, likewise point forward to Hegel's notion of movement that drives modern dialectical thought.

In this way, movement is often coded as modern, while stasis is relegated to a premodern past.