Beyond Theory: Eighteenth-Century German Literature and the Poetics of Irony

by Benjamin Bennett

In a book of rare breadth of vision, Benjamin Bennett offers a new interpretation of the eighteenth century. Undertaking nuanced re-evaluations of Goethe, Herder, Holderlin, Kleist, Lessing, Schiller, Nietzsche, and Kant, as well as many other poets and philosophers, Bennett seeks to trace the process by which modernity was formed in eighteenth-century German thought. The particular importance of German literature, he maintains, lies neither in its content nor in anything that might be termed style or spirit. Rather, its significance rests primarily on the radically subversive irony of its poetic discourse.
Applying the insights of twentieth-century theory and philosophy, Bennett offers close readings of Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, Holderlin's "An die Parzen," and Lessing's Laokoon, and he explores in detail the significance of Jewry in German dramatic discourse. The experiential German writing of the eighteenth century, he demonstrates, was grounded deeply and productively in irony, not subject to dissipation in mere ironic play. Bennett perceives that many of the questions posed by eighteenth-century discourse - such as the difference between thought and language, the nature of the social, or the origin of the individual in the communal - remain current for us today.
Beyond Theory is sure to provoke thought and stimulate debate among Germanists, comparatists, literary theorists, and others interested in the cultural history of eighteenth-century Europe.

354 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1993