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Goethe's Families of the Heart: New Directions in German Studies

Autor Professor Susan E. Gustafson
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 23 aug 2017
Throughout his literary work Goethe portrays characters who defy and reject 18th and 19th century ideals of aristocratic and civil families, notions of heritage, assumptions about biological connections, expectations about heterosexuality, and legal mandates concerning marriage. The questions Goethe's plays and novels pose are often modern and challenging: Do social conventions, family expectations, and legal mandates matter? Can two men or two women pair together and be parents? How many partners or parents should there be? Two? One? A group? Can parents love children not biologically related to them? Do biological parents always love their children? What is the nature of adoptive parents, children, and families? Ultimately, what is the fundamental essence of love and family? Gustafson demonstrates that Goethe's conception of the elective affinities is certainly not limited to heterosexual spouses or occasionally to men desiring men. A close analysis of Goethe's explication of affinities throughout his literary production reveals his rejection of loveless relationships (for example, arranged marriages) and his acceptance and promotion of all relationships formed through spontaneous affinities and love (including heterosexual, same-sex, nonexclusive, group, parental, and adoptive).
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9781501336072
ISBN-10: 150133607X
Pagini: 208
Dimensiuni: 216 x 141 x 18 mm
Greutate: 0.25 kg
Ediția:NIPPOD
Editura: Bloomsbury Publishing
Colecția Bloomsbury Academic
Seria New Directions in German Studies

Locul publicării:New York, United States

Caracteristici

Connects the concept of elective affinities that Goethe outlines in his famous novel, Die Wahlverwandschaften (Elective Affinities), to his literary production from 1776-1829

Notă biografică

Susan E. Gustafson is Karl F. and Bertha A. Fuchs Professor of German Studies at the University of Rochester, USA. Her areas of research include 18th-20th-century German literature, aesthetic theory, conceptions of families, gender studies, psychoanalysis, and feminism. She is the author of Absent Mothers and Orphaned Fathers: Narcissism and Abjection in Lessing's Aesthetic Production (1995) and Men Desiring Men: The Poetry of Same-Sex Identity and Desire in German Classicism (2002).

Cuprins

Introduction Chapter 1: Same-Sex, Nonexclusive, and Adoptive Affinities in Goethe's WahlverwandtschaftenChapter 2: Same-sex Affinities Between Women and Family Redefinitions in Goethe's StellaChapter 3: Learning What Family and Love can be in Wilhelm Meisters LehrjahreChapter 4: Asserting and Affirming All Elective Affinities in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre ConclusionBibliographyIndex

Recenzii

Susan Gustafson's central thesis is attractive and persuasive ... This book offers a good deal of illumination.
A series of fresh, incisive, and beautifully nuanced readings that recast our understanding of Goethe's art and sensibilities ... All in all, this is a skillfully crafted work that constitutes a distinctive and rewarding contribution to existing Goethe scholarship and to eighteenth- and early-nineteenth- century German studies more generally.
Goethe's Families of the Heart presents us with a revolutionary and experimental Goethe, one whose literary depictions of unconventional family groupings and love relationships seem radical even today. In her original readings of well-known texts, Susan Gustafson uncovers, throughout Goethe's works, a consistent emphasis on fluidity: shifting bonds between lovers, or parents and children, that transcend established categories of biology, gender and social status. Resonating with 21st-century debates about definitions of the family, gender and sexuality while remaining attentive to the historical and cultural context of Goethe's works, this book is sure to provoke discussion among thoughtful and curious readers.
Goethe's Families of the Heart proposes a refreshingly clear and entirely convincing reading of the complex nature of the family in Goethe's oeuvre. Through nuanced interpretations of some of Goethe's major literary works, Gustafson shows how Goethe advocates for a model of family that belies bourgeois norms for marriage and family based on blood, heterosexuality and economic alliance. With aplomb, Gustafson points to Goethe's many "elective" families, families of the heart. Gustafson offers a vital intervention into scholarship of the Goethezeit, reminding us through her close readings of Goethe's works of the autonomy of literary discourses vis-à-vis dominant ideologies. Goethe's Families of the Heart makes an eloquent and compelling case for the centrality of love in all its forms, traditional and queer, within Goethe's literary oeuvre.
Goethe's work is famous for its unorthodox or 'fractured' families, but Gustafson pursues a new line of argument about human connections in the novels and plays, locating multiple 'elective families,' groupings based primarily on choices dictated by love. For Gustafson, attractions in Goethe are fluid, non-exclusive, and person-based rather than fixed, monogamous, and gender-based. Her readings of major canonical texts such as Elective Affinities, the Wilhelm Meister novels and Stella provide crucial additions and corrections to our understanding of these works. Gustafson's arguments are as novel as they are convincing. An important book.
Susan Gustafson's most recent work is truly novel in its approach and refreshing for its ecumenical breadth. She borrows from yet broadens queer and gender theory in examining Goethe's expansive concept of desire. Lucidly written, Goethe's Families of the Heart is thrilling to read for its discovery of the ever-shifting affinities and relationships in Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Stella, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. According to Gustafson, Goethe consistently challenges bourgeois family norms of constancy and biological inheritance. His families are radical ones, composed of adoptive children and same-sex adult households. What is decisively unique about Goethe's Families of the Heart is that it brings back love to the table. This is a courageous, life-affirming book that does not shy away from addressing the topics of commitment and the connections of the heart.
Gustafson (Univ. of Rochester) analyzes familial relationships in Goethe's key works, primarily Elective Affinities and the two Wilhelm Meister novels. She argues that all three works describe familial relations corrupted by "suffocating" bourgeois or "aristocratic" values or issues of prestige and money. Happiness is found only when one escapes the constrictions of society and follows one's innate affinities (Wahlverwandtschaften). The starting point for this interpretation is Goethe's famous device linking the tendency of certain elements to displace others in a chemical reaction with the human displacement depicted in Elective Affinities. Happily married Charlotte and Eduard invite the Captain and Ottilie to their estate. Eduard is attracted to Ottilie, Charlotte to the Captain. Tragedy ensues, not happiness. Gustafson finds similar actions in the two Meister novels, concluding that Goethe "outlines the fundamental need to remove all obstacles to all love relationships including heterosexual, same-sex, nonexclusive, group, and adoptive families." New relationships are motivated among dozens of Goethe's figures by these all-powerful elective affinities. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
Susan Gustafson's Goethe's Families of the Heart presents an innovative examination of relationships and families in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's literary works . Gustafson provides an excellent analysis and numerous examples of elective affinities and adoptive families in Goethe's works . Goethe's Families of the Heart is a significant and timely book not only because of its revolutionary analysis of Goethe's literary works, but also because it raises profound questions about the essence of relationships and the family that resonate in the Goethezeit as well as today.