In this book, the author has three aims: (1) to elaborate an
interpretation of Goethe's lyric poetry adequate to the intricacies
of its subject matter; (2) to demonstrate the significance of that
poetry to the development of European Romanticism; (3) to establish
a method of inquiry that weaves together the major strands of
theoretical reflection in modern literary studies. Remarkably
enough, no study of Goethe's early lyric poetry has been published
in English in the last fifty years. But the reading of this poetry
the author presents is not intended merely to introduce an English
readership to a major body of work; rather, the book delineates for
the first time in any language an account of the symbolic network
or organizing myth that underlies Goethe's individual poems. This
marks a decisive break with the previous research on Goethe, which
has tended to view his poetry as the expression of occasional
experiences. The author shows, on the contrary, that Goethe's lyric
work circles around a core set of problems and figures, that it
evinces a systematic coherence until now unperceived despite an
enormous interpretive literature. In the literature on European
Romanticism, consideration of the German contribution has typically
been restricted to the theoretical work of the Schlegel brothers
and Novalis, and philosophers such as Schelling and Hegel. The
author contends that the ideas they articulated were first worked
through in Goethe's astonishingly bold poetic experimentation. In
this sense, Goethe's lyric can be seen to constitute one of
Romanticism's earliest and most significant beginnings. In addition
to its interpretive and historical dimensions, The Specular Moment
pursues a methodological aim. The author has combined the insights
of linguistics, semiotics, psychoanalysis, social history, and
philosophy in such a way that they yield a powerful and supple
instrument of analysis. Thus, the book offers a fully developed
contribution to the contemporary debate on method, a contribution
that argues for interdisciplinarity, descriptive precision,
controlled conjecture, and, above all, respect for literary
complexity and nuance.
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