This is a collection of various things I've found on the net.
I am not responsible for putting them here, however.  The
lack of material in English on this subject is overwhelming, 
and Novalis is almost unknown.  His work is now only slowly being
translated into English.  I'm not sure the copyright status of
these texts but will take them off this page if need be.



                                        Angelic voices.

ANGELIC VOICES

THE BLUE FLOWER Penelope Fitzgerald FLAMINGO,fI4.99



Penelope Fitzgerald's novels are pools of prosaic Englishness into which
she drops improbable pebbles. The resulting clouds elevate her finely
crafted books above the cul-de-sac of much English writing. Yet they
remain novels of the possible, quietly mimetic and defined by subtleties,
so that The Blue Flower is itself a large stone dropped into her work. 

A young Georg Lukacs proclaimed the German writer Novalis (1772-1801)-
"The Poet of the Blue Flower"--as the symbol of Romanticism. Fitzgerald
has written a kind of fictional biography of this intense young graduate,
born Fritz yon Hardenberg, centred on his tortured worship of the
12-year-old Sophie yon Kubn. The novel ends just before her death at 115,
and Fritz's adoption of the name Novalis: "clearer of new land". To
demonstrate that this is not wholly uncharted territory for her,
Fitzgerald introduces the poet to us surrounded by his family' s damp
underwear. 

This work is a significant departure. Previously, for example, Fitzgerald
has dropped Lolita into an English village and had fun with its ripples.
In her last and most complex novel, The Gate of Angels, the angelic figure
of Daisy, whose sick-bed sighting engenders devotion in a young scientist
called Fred, anticipates this new book.  Nevertheless, then it was still
all tangled bicycles, muted language and blushing seriousness. 

The boldness of The Blue Flower lies in Fitzgerald taking on German
cultural forms. It is not merely that Novalis, as poet and philosopher,
barely exists in English, but that this fantastically rich period of
late-18th century German culture is so removed from British experience.
Fitzgerald is compelled to people her book with key figures--Fichte,
Goethe and Schlegel--as well as to pepper its dialogue with maxims from
Idealist and early Romantic philosophy. Much conversation about "beautiful
souls" and "moral grace" is also needed. 

Fitzgerald's boldness pays off: this is her best novel by some way, and a
very solid achievement.  Sympathetic research and tight plotting recreate
Germany in the 1790s as we follow the ascetic Fritz from his family's
faded nobility through his studies and apprenticeship to the Salt Mine
Directorate. Fitzgerald is a scene-setter and her evocation of the cold,
of dining, clothes and manners is powerful. It concentrates impressively
during a tragically doomed engagement party. 

But, having embarked on "this road of the impossible", she left "that most
dangerous of possessions", language, behind. Central to the book is
Sophie's unrepresentable symbolism, which Fitzgerald conveys in prose that
is pedestrian and halting. It reveals that her avoidance of the impossible
in Fritz's experience is an avoidance of engagement with language.  This
is symptomatic of English writing, and ultimately prevents this fine book
from becoming an exceptional one. 

~~~~~~~~

By GUY MANNES-ABBOTT




Mannes-Abbott, Guy, Angelic voices.., Vol. 8, New Statesman & Society,
01-01-1995, pp 38.


                                         After the fall.

Novalis: A Romantic's Theory of Language and Poetry
by Kristin Pfefferkorn,

 Novalis will remind everyone of his or her favorite Romantic poet: of
Wordsworth, for his concern with the language of poetry and trust in the
intuitions of the child; of Coleridge, for his philosophy and his massive
notebooks; of Keats, for his sensuous intensity; of Blake, for his
fondness for the German mystic Jacob Boehme. Carlyle devoted one of his
early essays to the German poet, and Emerson spoke of ``the ardent and
sainted Novalis.'' All of them were eager to find a remedy for the
estrangement that they felt had split subject from object, man from
nature, thinking from feeling. Their remedy was poetry. They believed that
poetry would restore mankind to what Novalis called transcendental health,
to such wholeness of being and harmony with the world that the autonomy of
the subject and its capacity for insight and self- understanding would
again be fully realized. In the end, all the world would become poetry,
and every one of us poets. 

     Romantic art, owing to this insistence on the primacy of the self,
often shows an isolated figure musing alone in the midst of nature. 
Feeding on nature, as it were, the mind builds its own ideal world within
the self, and the medium of this private activity is language. Without
language, there could be no musing, no poetry at all. ``We know something
only in so far as we can express it, i.e., make it,'' said Novalis,
reiterating a Romantic commonplace.  The poet's first question, therefore,
is: How can language meet the high aims of poetry? This is the central
problem of Romantic aesthetics, which are known in English from
Wordsworth's prefaces to Lyrical Ballads. Novalis's theories of poetics
and language are chiefly found in his remarkable notebooks, which range
widely over the philosophical issues of his time. 

     Though Novalis died of consumption at 28 in 1801, he managed to have
two productive careers during his short life. In public life, in which he
was known as Friedrich von Hardenberg, he rose to high office in the Saxon
mining industry. He was ambitious, worked hard, studied science and
technology under some of the best specialists of the day, and gave immense
care to official reports that are still admired for both style and
thoroughness. No Romantic equaled his command of science and mathematics. 
He said himself that he considered his literary pursuits strictly
secondary to his professional, public work. As a poet he called himself
Novalis: he found the name in the early records of his noble family, but
it probably meant most to him because it is the Latin word for a meadow
ready for cultivation, for new fruit. 

     As a poet-philosopher, Novalis was extravagantly speculative and
visionary, to a degree that makes him a sort of super-romantic. He is best
known for the short cycle of poems called ``Hymns to the Night.''
Celebrated as an emblematic expression of the Romantic spirit, this cycle
was one of the few writings that were published during his lifetime. Most
of what he wrote for publication -- including the two mysterious prose
romances Heinrich von Ofterdingen and Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (``The
Apprentices of Sais''), which were both intended to form part of larger
works that were never written, appeared the year after his death, in two
volumes that were edited by his friends Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich
Schlegel. 

     These volumes also contained a selection of the vast mass of notes in
which Novalis recorded his efforts to shape a poetic philosophy of
existence.  These notes exhibit the typical Romantic blend of aesthetics
and epistemology that results when language is made the key to all
understanding. The published notes have steadily grown in bulk as more and
more have been put into print in successive editions; in the recently
completed edition in five hefty volumes, they form much the greater part
of Novalis's oeuvre. (From 1960 on, this edition has substantially revised
our previous view of the chronology and the ordering of the notes, thus
advancing our knowledge of Novalis's thought and its development.) 

     Novalis's thought took shape to solve a conflict between philosophy
and religion. He grew up in a particularly intimate form of religion,
which held that the certainty of God's creation of man must be matched by
the certainty of his creation of nature as our home and as a limitless
source of reverential admiration. Blue skies, flowers, little animals,
being God's work, are just as real as we are. With its stress on the
subjectivity of experience, however, German idealism of the late
eighteenth century had raised doubts about the raw existence of that other
world, even to the point of suggesting that it might be a projection of
our minds -- which might seem like a claim that things are because we
think them. 

     Novalis knew Fichte, studied his writings, absorbed his philosophy; 
but he could not accept the implication that the world of nature had only
a secondary existence. He found a solution to the conflict in the mystical
tradition that had informed his own pietism, especially in the German
mystic Jacob Boehme (1574-1624), to whose writings he turned after Fichte.
What he found in the mystical tradition were four related conceptions,
which became familiar ideas in Romantic thought. The first was the
so-called doctrine of correspondence, according to which the two worlds of
man and nature, the microcosm and the macrocosm, are joined in perfect
harmony since both are God's creation.  The world, therefore, is not an
alien place, and we can, if we choose, be at home in it. 

     The second notion held that man had once lived in perfect harmony
with nature because he possessed a language that gave direct and
sympathetic knowledge of the creatures, much like the language that Adam
was said to have used when he named the animals in Eden. The third taught
that this harmony had been shattered when man made himself master of
creation; the result was a spiritual and epistemological fall, as man lost
the knowledge and the language that had secured the harmony. And the
fourth conception saw the remedy for this estrangement in the recovery of
the Adamic language. 

     Access to the Adamic language could only be mystical; but Novalis did
not follow that path. Unlike the mystics, he did not seek a return to a
golden age of the past. Instead, he envisioned a future golden age to be
attained by the poeticization of the world. But he agreed with the mystics
both on the cause of our loss and on the idea that the recovery of
knowledge required a language powerful and rich enough to express that
knowledge. Language was the seam between the two estranged halves; the
Romantic theory of language gave hope that they could again be joined. 

     Novalis held that language was the primal act of all human
creativity, and the progenitor of the self-awareness that is the condition
for our knowledge of self and of the world. The notion pivots on the
principle that thinking and speaking, thought and language are
inseparable. Wilhelm von Humboldt had built his philosophy of language on
this principle, and in the same spirit Wordsworth insisted that our
expressions must be ``a constituent part and power or function of the
thought,'' and not the mere outward clothing of it. Thus linguistic
creativity enlarges the fullness of our insight and understanding;  its
essential nature is the spontaneous expression of the psyche, of our
feelings, thoughts, and imaginings. Since it is both the organ of thought
and the medium of poetry, only language can bring the two severed worlds
back together again. 

     On this matter, too, Novalis found himself at odds with Fichte. In
the mid- 1790s, just as Novalis was beginning his Fichte studies, Fichte
published an essay in which he urged that language was not necessary to
thinking. This position was consistent with his philosophy (Kant had also
omitted language from his), but it was also an anachronism, for it revived
the very rationalism that had created the split between subject and object
that Romanticism sought to transcend. 

     The rationalism of Descartes had made vision and the eye the test of
truth. Clarity and distinctness, geometry and mathematics were the
criteria of any true understanding of the world. Questions of beauty,
love, and value were relegated to the subjective realm of our shifting
passions, where true knowledge was not possible. The spirit of rationalism
was displayed in those vast empty spaces whose silence frightened Pascal.
Rationalism had bought its much prized objectivity at the cost of making
us into little creatures crawling around in an indifferent world in which
our self-knowledge counted for nothing.  Consistent with such an outlook,
rationalism held that language was the mere outward representation of
thought, with words serving the utilitarian needs of communication by
supplying a nomenclature for concepts that came ready-made from the mind's
wordless activity. In the rationalist view, our language was a debased
form of an originally divine and rational language. 

     For the Romantics, by contrast, it was the essential expression of
our being, because we had made it and continued to keep it at our command. 
Thinking and speaking being partners, it followed that the very use of
language gives us the means of knowledge that the mystics had attributed
to the lost language of Adam. Conversation, therefore, is the way to
truth, to harmony among ourselves, to intimacy with the other half of
creation. 

     Conversation banished alienation by creating closeness and a deep
kind of interpenetration. When Novalis first met the philosopher
Schelling, he wrote to a friend that they had spent some precious hours
``symphilosophizing'' together.  Some months later he wrote that, though
he badly lacked books, he missed even more having people around with whom
he could, as he said, ``electrify myself. I am chiefly creative in
conversation.'' In the last months of his life, he found it a great
hardship that he was not allowed to talk much, for speaking ``has for me
been almost indispensable to thinking.''

     The creative quality of conversation made company essential in the
lives of the young Romantics. The programs that were proclaimed in
Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads (1798) and in the Schlegel
brothers' journal Athenaeum (1798-1800) emerged from small groups of
intense young people of both sexes who craved constant discussion among
themselves to nourish and formulate their thinking. This may seem
paradoxical, since we do not ordinarily associate Romanticism with
gregariousness. For the Romantics, however, the gregariousness of
language, if we can call it that, was at the center of their enterprise. 

     The great question was how we enter into conversation with nature so
that we can enjoy the harmony promised by the correspondence doctrine; for
once we have that enjoyment, we also have the self-knowledge that is the
final aim of poetry. Novalis gave a part of the answer in his major work,
Heinrich von Ofterdingen, which was to be, he said, the ``apotheosis of
poetry.'' It is about the formation of a young man, who, though born a
poet, must struggle with the world to gain his voice. Through his many
encounters and experiences he learns much, but his vision is still
limited: ``He saw the world lie before him in its large and varied forms.
But she was still mute and her soul, conversation, had not yet been
awakened.''

     Then a great change comes over our hero, who meets a great poet whose
very language inspires Heinrich to enter the realm of true poetry by
giving voice to nature. From now on Heinrich makes rapid progress, soon
remarking that ``language is truly a little world in signs and sounds,''
in which we wish also to encompass the great world in order to have the
joy of expression that is both the primal urge of our being and the
essence of poetry. To this the great poet remarks that it is too bad we
have such limiting terms as poetry and poet, for poetry ``is not at all
something special. It is the human spirit's characteristic mode of
activity; doesn't everyone make poetry and aspire to it every minute?''
Poetry is the quintessence of humanity. 

     The poet gives voice to nature by naming. He can perform this task
because ``the true poet is all-knowing; he is a real world in miniature.''
As a microcosm, he has in himself the seed of everything in the world, if
only he will open himself to it and speak the language that joins us with
nature.  Novalis conceived this naming on the analogy of the
mathematician's play with signs and formulae. This conception may seem
extravagant, but it is in fact implied in the correspondence doctrine.
About this naming ``poetic philosopher''

 Novalis said that he ``is en etat de Createur absolu. A circle, a
triangle are created in that fashion. They have no quality except what the
maker put into them.'' Elsewhere he observed that, like mathematics,
language ``is a world of its own, it plays only with itself, expresses
nothing but its own wonderful nature and is for that reason expressive
because it mirrors the curious play of relations among things.'' But since
this language is the product of conversation, it is not like the merely
imposed signs of the rationalist.  Novalis's idea of the ultimate mission
of poetry was expressed in his saying that ``when our mind and our world
harmonize, then we are like God.'' In the form of poetry, language
promised the future attainment of a golden age that would last forever.
Novalis was unequaled, surely, in the grandeur of his idea of poetry as
redemption. 

     Kristin Pfefferkorn has chosen an important and difficult subject. It
requires, for a start, a thorough understanding of the theories of
language that were current around 1800. Unfortunately she is disastrously
unfamiliar with the relevant literature, primary and secondary, and fills
the vacuum with guesswork and misinterpretation. About Novalis's interest
in hieroglyphics, for example, she suggests that it may have been
triggered by ``Napoleon's return from his campaign of 1798-99 with ancient
Egyptian artifacts that inspired wonder and admiration.'' But Napoleon did
not return with artifacts; they, and the excitement, came much later, long
after Novalis's death. It is distressing to find, in a study of a major
figure in German literature, no awareness that Diderot, Hamann, Herder,
Schiller, Baader, and others treated hieroglyphics as a significant topic
in the theory of language and aesthetics. 

     Especially serious, however, is Pfefferkorn's ignorance that
Novalis's relation to Fichte has been cast in an entirely new light by the
very edition of his notes that she uses. In previous editions of Novalis,
the notes on Fichte had been mixed with notes from other sources, but in
the current edition Hans-Joachim Mahl has, with immense editorial care,
separated the Fichte notes from the rest and placed them in the order in
which they seem to have been written. Pfefferkorn has completely missed
the facts and the implications of Mahl's and the other editors' work. Her
book originated as a doctoral dissertation, and it should have been left
in the darkness of the microfilm archives. 

     By HANS AARSLEFF

     HANS AARSLEFF teaches at Princeton University and is the author of
From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual
History (University of Minnesota Press). 



New Republic is the property of New Republic and may not be copied without
the express written permission of New Republic Aarsleff, H., After the
fall.., Vol. 203, New Republic, 12-31-1990, pp 40. 











                                  An answer to everything. 

AN ANSWER TO EVERYTHING

There is more than one way to reach a conclusion

FOR centuries people have dreamed of a reasoning machine so powerful that
it could eliminate human argument. A 17th-century mathematician and
philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz, fantasised about devising logical
techniques that would let any two philosophers settle any debate once and
for all just by sitting down and ``calculating''. The more time people
spend searching for the ultimate reasoning mechanism, the more evidence
piles up that such things cannot exist. 

Some things are just not decidable by logic--even if they are logical
problems. Although computer reasoners can be guaranteed to answer some
(but only some) sorts of questions, they cannot be guaranteed to answer
all questions of that sort. And even for the sort of work that automated
reasoners can do, there is no guarantee that they will grind to a halt and
reach a conclusion before the universe itself does. 

Such realisations are humbling for researchers looking into computer
reasoning. They would love to come up with ways of improving on human
reasoning; but many would be happy just to devise ways of muddling along
as well as people do. Even that is proving to be quite a challenge. The
research is proceeding on two levels. Theoretically, the task is to come
up with better theories for understanding reasoning. Practically, the task
is building these new theories into working computer programs. Muddled
progress is being made on both fronts. 

Wrong again

Some of the most interesting results come from trying to extend the
deductive procedures of formal logic to the real world. Historically,
systems of logic were designed to study problems in which all the relevant
facts are known and any new information is guaranteed not to contradict
the old. Such assumptions turn out to be completely unrealistic for
solving practical problems. 

For example, conventional theories of logic are flummoxed by the
introduction of anomalous terms such as ``penguin''. A useful assumption
for anyone or anything that wants to reason about the world is that birds
fly.  Yet penguins are defined as birds, and penguins do not fly. Faced
with such a contradiction, conventional logics must either give up the
convenient assumption that birds can fly, or foreswear thinking about
penguins.  So-called non-monotonic logics can do better. 

At the theoretical level, John McCarthy of Stanford University has
proposed a theory called circumscription. This shows that most of the
useful deductive tools of logic still apply if generalisations such as
``birds can fly'' are qualified by a phrase like ``assuming there is
nothing abnormal about them''. And there are other variants on this
approach. 

At a practical level, the real work of non-monotonic reasoning is done by
the wonderfully named ``truth-maintenance system'' (TMS), originally
developed by Jon Doyle of MIT (and since improved upon by others, notably
Johan de Kleer of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre). At heart, a
truth-maintenance system is a sort of book-keeping device that keeps track
of which conclusions depend on which premises. When a contradiction (eg, a
flightless bird) is found, the TMS can work through the chain of reasoning
to see which assumptions will have to be withdrawn to restore consistency. 

Dr de Kleer reckons that a TMS could be used to help machines diagnose
themselves--predictably, the Xerox researcher has photocopiers in mind. 
The idea is to build into the machine a logical model of how it should
work:  eg, ``if the roller turns, the paper will be drawn into the slot''.
When something does not work, the symptoms would contradict the
predictions of the logical model. The TMS could then see which of the
model's assumptions led to those false predictions, and so diagnose the
problem. 

Jumping to conclusions

But in machines, as in people, logic is not the only way to reach a
conclusion. One alternative is statistics. Instead of making assumptions
that later have to be retracted, statistical reasoning uses probabilities
to express the idea of ``maybe''. For example, one popular technique for
statistical reasoning, called fuzzy logic, expresses the idea that someone
is tall in terms of the probabilities that someone of a given height would
be considered tall. So a five-foot man might have a 10% chance of being
regarded as tall, while a six-footer would have a 60% chance, and so on. A
machine can then reason by combining probabilities. For example, it could
use the chance that someone is tall, together with the chance that he is
fat, to calculate the chance that he can fit into a small car. 

The attractive thing about all the techniques for combining probabilities
is that they work with a continuous range of values, not just the narrow-
minded pair, ``true'' and ``false''. This makes them wonderful for
controlling machinery. If the clothes are very dirty, the machine washes
them very hard;  not-so-dirty clothes get a not-so-hard wash; and so
flexibly on through the scale of dirtiness. Japanese companies are taking
advantage of these abilities by building fuzzy logic into machines ranging
from vacuum cleaners to passenger trains. 

Statistical reasoners, however, are not much good for repairing, say,
photocopiers: one cannot replace 60% of a roller. Another snag with most
forms of statistical reasoning is that they only approximate the real
rules of statistics, so their conclusions are only approximately right.
Although exactly the sort of statistical theories that computer-reasoners
would like to use were thoughtfully created in the 18th century by Thomas
Bayes, a British philosopher, their accuracy depends on keeping track of
the interdependence of various sorts of evidence. If A serves as evidence
for B while B serves as evidence for A, a naive statistical reasoner can
create certainty from a mere fragment of evidence for either. In recent
years, however, Judea Pearl of the University of California at Los Angeles
and others have found ways to cope with such tricky interdependence, and
more accurate Bayesian reasoners are being tested in several laboratories. 

When neither statistics nor logic will do, yet another alternative is to
proceed by analogy and example. Janet Kolodner of the Georgia Institute of
Technology has created methods of ``case-based reasoning'' to let
computers solve problems by finding a precedent. One ambitious use of this
is evolving at Compaq Computer, which is using a case-based reasoning tool
created by Inference. This lets technicians at Compaq's support centre
type in the symptoms of a sick computer and retrieve the cure that has
been recommended for similar symptoms in the past. If the symptoms are
unfamiliar, or a previous cure does not work, Inference's tool makes a new
entry for whatever cure the technician comes up with, so that others will
gain the benefit of his experience. 

One snag with case-based reasoning, as Katia Sycara of Carnegie-Mellon
points out, is giving the computer a reasonable idea of similarity so that
it can find relevant precedents. This restricts its use to problems that
can be described clearly and simply. And even in the technical languages
of computer faults, according to Brad Allen of Inference, everybody
involved in the systems needs to get together regularly to make sure they
are speaking the same language. 

Illustration







   A bibliography of German romantic literary criticism and theory in
English.

What follows is an enumerative bibliography, first, of writings by German
Romantic literary critics
and theorists available in English
translation and, second, of writings (in English) on the German Romantics
as critics and theorists
of literature.

It is very clear what the focus of any such listing must be: namely, on
the work produced during
the last decade of the eighteent
century in Jena, where Novalis, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Tieck, and
Freidrich and August
Wilhelm Schlegel lived for much of the
time, and where they were visited by Fichte, Hegel, Hi51defiin, and Jean
Paul, in a configuration
culminating in the brilliant if
short-lived publication of the Athenaeum (1798-1800). By contrast, it is
quite obscure where the
borders should be drawn around a
listing of this sort, since so much German writing of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries is
connected, arguably, to Romanticism,
and bears upon topics relevant to literary study. As one way of delimiting
matters, I have not
attempted to list writings on language,
literature, or aesthetics by any of the major German Preromantics--i.e.,
Hamann, Herder,
Lessing, Schiller, or Winckelmann. The
exception that I had to make here, of course, was for Goethe, who belongs
to the age of the
Schlegels as much as he does to that of
Schiller. Nevertheless, Goethe's huge and varied output brings its own
difficulties with it, so that I
have had to be highly selective in
listing his works, confining myself solely to those writings of his which
deal more or less
completely and directly with literature and
general aesthetics, or which are translated in the main English language
collections. A particular
problem in this respect lies in the fact
that there are numerous, extended discussions of literary and aesthetic
topics running all through
Goethe's writing- -notably in Wilhelm
Meister and Poetry and Truth, but also in his Conversations and
elsewhere--none of which is
listed here. Another particular problem
arising in Goethe's case is that his writings on the visual arts bear upon
aesthetic questions, so
that I could also have included an
(English language) anthology of his writings such as Goethe on Art, ed.
and trans. John Gage (U
of California P, 1980), which overlaps
with the collections that I do list; but the lack of reference to literary
topics in this volume
dissuaded me from doing so.

Another limitation that I have imposed on this bibliography for practical
reasons has been to
separate out the work of philosophers and
writers on general aesthetics (even including those by figures such as
Fichte and Schelling, who
were certainly organic members of the
Jena group of Romantics), and to list their writings, along with secondary
writings that primarily
concern them, in a separate section
(Part 3), where the listing is considerably more selective than those in
Part 2, which covers
writings by and about figures who dealt
directly with literature, and which--except in the case of Goethe, in the
ways just noted-- is
intended to be comprehensive. With some
hesitation, I have also listed translations of work in hermeneutics (e.g.,
by Schleiermacher) and
philology (e.g., Wolf) in Part 2, as
belonging, by virtue of its indisputable influence upon them, to the
theoretical and critical work on
literature of the Romantics.

GENERAL NOTE

The three parts of this bibliography are subdivided into a total five
sections, along with an
appendix, as follows:

1. Anthologies

2A. Literary Criticism and Theory: Authors

2B. Literary Criticism and Theory: Commentary

3A. Philosophical and Aesthetic Work: Selections

3B. Philosophical and Aesthetic Work: Selected Commentary Appendix:
Romantic Writings
Translated in L'absolu litteraire

Except for section 1, the arrangement of material in the sections
following is alphabetical by
author and, within an author listing,
chronological by date of publication (or first composition), with
collections of varying dates
preceding, and undated works concluding
an author entry where appropriate (mostly in section 2A). In section 1,
the arrangement is
chronological, as conveying more
significance in a listing of collections of German Romantic writings in
English translation.

All additions and revisions to information given in the original are
bracketed, with the exception
that I have used arabic numerals
throughout, regularizing roman numerals where necessary. All references in
later sections of this
bibliography are to works listed in
section I (where abbreviations for each work are given in boldface),
except as indicated.

Any items that I have not been able to see are asterisked.

1. ANTHOLOGIES

Translating Literature: The German Tradition from Luther to Rosenzweig.
Ed. Andre Lefevere.
Assen: Van Gorcum, 1977. [Lefevere
77]

German Romantic Criticism. Ed. A. Leslie Willson. New York: Continuum,
1982. [Willson]

German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 3 vols.:

Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Goethe. Ed. H. B. Nisbet.
1985. [Nisbet]

Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel. Ed. David Simpson. 1984.
[Simpson 84]

The Romantic Ironists and Goethe. Ed. Kathleen M. Wheeler. 1984. [Wheeler]

Abr.: The Origins of Modern Critical Thought: German Aesthetic and
Literary Criticism from
Lessing to Hegel. Ed. David Simpson.
1988. [Simpson 88]

Philosophy of German Idealism[: Fichte, Jacobi, Schelling]. Ed. Ernst
Behler. New York:
Continuum, 1987. [Behler]

The Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the
Enlightenment to the
Present. Ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer. New
York: Continuum, 1989. [Mueller-Volimer]

The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur. Ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and
Alan D. Schrift.
Albany: SUNY, 1990.
[Ormiston/Schrift]

Translation/History/Culture: A Sourcebook. Ed. Andre Lefevere. London:
Routledge, 1992.
[Lefevere 92]

2A. LITERARY CRITICISM AND THEORY: AUTHORS

This listing is intended to be complete, except for one kind of omission.
A characteristic of
Romantic belief about literature and literary
criticism is that no sharp distinction should be drawn between the two
activities. Consistent with
this belief, most of the Romantics who
wrote about literature also produced literary work, and in both cases
there was an attempt to blur
the two elements: that is to say,
Romantic critical and theoretical writings typically have a creative,
stylized, or otherwise literary
quality (the fragments of Novalis and
Friedrich Schlegel serving as a clear example of this), while their
literary writings frequently have
a self-reflexive, critical and theoretical
cast to them (with Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, of course, setting the
example and starting the
fashion for this kind of thing during the
period, though the ultimate ancestor here is doubtless Steme).

Therefore I should perhaps have opened this section to creative as well as
critical/scholarly work,
particularly to such self-conscious
novels and romances as Holderlin's Hyperion (1797-1799), Novalis's Novices
at Sais (1798) and
Heinrich yon Ofierdingen
(1799-1800), F. Schlegel's Lucinde (1799), Tieck's Franz Stern-bald's
Wanderings (1798), and
W. H. Wackenroder's Outpourings of
an Art-Loving Friar (1797), as well as many works of indeterminate genre
by the prolific Jean
Paul. However, since this possibility
threatened to make the listing hopelessly uncircumscribed, I have not
attempted to realize it. The
one exception I have made here--as
being unavoidable--is in the case of Kleist's "On the Marionette Theater"
and one other short
piece of his (going by the suggested
criterion, however, I could have listed many of Kleist's tales).

FRIEDRICH AST (1778-1841)

"Hermeneutics" 1808. Trans. Dora Van Vranken. Ormiston/Schrift 39- 56.
Sections 69-93 of
Grundlinien der Grammatik: Hermeneutik
und Kritik.

[PHILIP] AUGUST BOECKH (1785-1867)

On Interpretation and Criticism. To 1865; pub. 1877; revised ed., 1886.
Ed. and trans. [of first
two parts] John Paul Pritchard.
Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1968. Three extracts ("Formal Theory of
Philology, " "Theory of
Hermeneutics," "Theory of Criticism")
rpt. Mueller-Voellmer 132-47.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE (1749-1832)

Literary Essays: A Selection in English. Ed. J. E. Spingarn. New York:
Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1921; rpt. New York: Ungar, 1964;
rpt. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1967.

Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. John Geary. Trans. Ellen von Nardoff and
Ernest H. von
Nardoff. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994.
Goethe's Collected Works, vol. 3.

* * *

"From Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship." 1796. Trans. Thomas Carlyle.
Edinburgh, 1824.
Extracts in Wheeler: "Hamlet Analysis"
[two extracts], "On the Novel and Drama." 231-36. Last two rpt. Simpson
88: 279-83.

"Winckelmann." 1805. Trans. H. B. Nisbet. Nisbet 233[6]-58. Sels.
["Antiquity," "Paganism,"
"Friendship," "Beauty"] in Simpson 88:
284- 88.

Also trans.: "Winckelmann and His Age." Geary [see above] 99-121.

* * *

"Aphorisms on Art and Art History." [N.d.] Trans. Joyce Crick. Wheeler
226-31.

Extracts on translation (various dates). Trans. Andre Lefevere. Lefevere
77: 35-39.

Sel. rpt., revised Lefevere 92: 24-25.

JOSEPH GORRES (1776-1835)

"The German Chapbooks." [1807.] Trans. [portion only] Ralph R. Read III.
Willson 162-74.

JAKOB GRIMM (1785-1863)

"Fidelity and Freedom." 1847. Trans. Andre Lefevere. Lefevere 77: 95.

"On the Origin of Language." 1851. Trans. Ralph R. Read III. Willson
257-92.

FRIEDRICH HOLDERLIN (1770-1843)

Essays and Letters on Theory. Ed. and trans. Thomas Pfau. Albany: SUNY,
1988. Incl.:

--"On the Law of Freedom." By 1794.33-34.

--"On the Concept of Punishment." 1795.35-36.

--"Judgment and Being." C. 1795.37-38.

--"The Perspective from which We Have to Look at Antiquity." By 1799.
9-40.

--"On the Different Forms of Poetic Composition." By 1799.41-44.

--"Reflection." 1799.45-48.

--"'The Sages, however '" 1799.49,

--"The Ground for 'Empedocles."' 1799.50-61.

--"On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit." 1800.62-82.

Also trans. Ralph R. Read III: "On the Process of the Poetic Mind. "
Willson 219-37.

--"On the Difference of Poetic Modes." 1800. 83-88.

--"The Significance of Tragedies." C. 1802.89.

--"On Religion." N.d. 90-95.

--"Becoming in Dissolution." 1800.96-100.

--"Remarks on 'Oedipus."' 1803. 101-08.

--"Remarks on 'Antigone."' 1803. 109-16.

Last two items also trans. Jeremy Adler: "On Tragedy: 'Notes on the
Oedipus' and 'Notes on the
Antigone."' Comparative Criticism 5
(1983): 205131]-44.

--Selected letters (1791-1802). 119-53.

--"The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism." [See section 3A, below,
under Author
Unknown].

WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT (1767-1835)

Humanist without Portfolio: An Anthology of the Writings of Wilhelm yon
Humboldt. Trans.
Marianne Cowan. Detroit: Wayne State
UP, 1963. Material excerpted from various sources (incl. correspondence).
See esp. sections on
"Man in the Realm of Spirit" and
"Man's Intrinsic Humanity: His Language." 145-298.

* * *

"On the Imagination." 1799. Trans. Ralph R. Read III. Willson 134- 61.

"A Theory of Translation." 1816. Trans. Andre Lefevere. Lefevere 77:
40-45; rpt. Lefevere 92:
135-41.

"On the Task of the Historian." 1821. Trans. Linda Gail DeMichiel.
Mueller-Vollmer 105-18.

Linguistic Variability and Intellectual Development. 1836. Trans. George
C. Buck and Frithjof A.
Raven. Coral Gables: U of Miami P,
1971. Extract ("The Nature and Conformation of Language") rpt. Mueller-
Voellmer 99-105.

Also trans. Peter Heath: On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-
Structure and Its
Influence on the Mental Development of
Mankind. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Trans. of Part I of Ober die
Kaswisprache aufder
Insel Java [On the Kawi Language on
the Island of Java].

HEINRICH VON KLEIST (1777-1811)

"On the Marionette Theater." 1810. Trans. Christian-Albrecht Gollub.
Willson 238-44.

Also trans. David Paisley: "On Puppet-Shows." Comparative Criticism 14
(1992): 141-46.

"Improbable Veracities." 1811. Trans. Carol Jacobs. Diacritics 9.4 (1979):
45-46. Rpt.
Uncontainable Romanticism: Shelley, Bronte,
Kleist. By Jacobs. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. 197-200.

ADAM MOLLER (1779-1829)

Twelve Lectures on Rhetoric. 1812. Trans. Dennis R. Bormann and Elisabeth
Leinfeller. Ann
Arbor: UMI, 1978.113-255.

Lecture 7: "On German Language and Writing." Willson 245-56.

NOVALIS [FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG] (1772-1801)

Note: Translations in Willson by Alexander Gelley; translations in Wheeler
by Joyce Crick.

Miscellaneous Remarks. [1797.] Trans. Alexander Gelley. New Literary
History 22 (1991): 383-
406.

Sel.: "From Miscellaneous Writings." Wheeler 84-92.

"Selected Aphorisms." 1798, posthumous. Hymns to the Night and Other
Selected Writings.
Trans. Charles E. Passage. Indianapolis:
Liberal Arts, 1960.65-72.

"On Goethe." 1798. Wheeler 102-08.

"Dialogues." 1798. Willson [first two of five] 77-82. Wheeler [all]
93-102.

"Monologue." [C. 1798.] Willson 82-83. Wheeler 92-93; rpt. Simpson 88:271
[3]-74.

"Studies in the Visual Arts." 1799. Wheeler 108-11.

"Aphorisms and Fragments." 1797-1799. Willson 62-83.

* * *

Extracts on translation. Trans Andre Lefevere. Lefevere 77: 64-65.

JEAN PAUL [JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER] (1763-1825)

School for Aesthetics. 1804; revised 1813.

Trans. Margaret R. Hale: Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter's School for
Aesthetics. Detroit:
Wayne State UP, 1973. Course 15
("Fragment on the German Language") abr.

Extracts in Willson 31-61:

--Course 1: "On Poetry in General" [section 1-5];

--Course 5: "On Romantic Poetry" [sections 21-25]. Extracts in Wheeler
16112]-201; part. rpt.
Simpson 88: 29113]-316:

--[from Course 2:] "On the Poetic Faculties" [sections 6-10 (7 abr. )];

--[from Course 3:] "On Genius" [sections 11-15 (13 abr., 14 omit.)];

--[from Course 7:] "On Humorous Poetry" [sections 31-35 (32, 34 abr. ;
incl. abrs. of sections 45,
50)];

--[from Course 9:1 "On Wit" [sections 42-51 (51 abr.)];

--[from Course 13:] "On the Novel" [sections 69-7l].

"Preschool of Aesthetics." 1825. Jean Paul: A Reader. Ed. Timothy J.
Casey. Trans. Erika
Casey. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP,
1992. Extracts: 241 [4]-68.

AUGUST WILHELM SCHLEGEL (1767-1845)

Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. 1808.

Trans. John Black: A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature.
London, 1815. Revised
A. J. W. Morrison. London, 1846;
rpt. New York: AMS, 1965.

Extracts rpt. Literary Criticism: Pope to Croce. Ed. Gay Wilson Allen and
Harry Hayden Clark.
1941; rpt. Detroit: Wa