Goethe und die Schweiz

Two Aspects of Language, Two Types of Comparison

“…That such contiguity is not uncomplicated is one of the chief insights of recent work on metonymy, above all Sebastian Matzner's study of 2016. There is no doubt that "the traditional figures of contiguity are metonymy and synecdoche", in the words of Wellek and Warren's influential Theory of Literature (1949;199); the question is, though, what exactly is meant here by "contiguity"? The term amounts, Matzner concludes after reviewing the Roman rhetoricians, to little more than a vague assertion of propinquity, with no inherent logical basis uniting both signifier and signified .…”

Worlding the Social Sciences and Humanities

“…It is generally agreed that for Goethe – to whom we owe the popularization of Weltliteratur as of 1827 through his famous conversations with Johan Peter Eckermann as reported in the latter’s Gespräche mit Goethe (1836) – the term covered the rapidly increasing exchange of literary goods and ideas among Europe’s intellectuals at the close of the Napoleonic era and the onset of what in various parts of Europe and in different languages would come to be known as the Victorian era or the Biedermeierzeit 24 . Even if Goethe himself in his scattered remarks on the subject repeatedly equated European literature with world literature, Fritz Strich, one of the most astute readers of Goethe on the topic, is of the opinion that for the Weimar sage ‘European literature, that is a literature of exchange and intercourse between the literatures of Europe and between the peoples of Europe, is the first stage of a world literature which from these beginnings will spread in ever-widening circles to a system which in the end will embrace the world.’ 25 If proof is needed, suffice it to mention that Goethe first thought of the very concept of Weltliteratur as an immediate result of his reading of one or a number of Chinese novels in translation, and that with his West-Eastern Divan of 1819 ‘Goethe himself began the task of incorporating in it the Asiatic world’ (Ref. 24, p. 16).…”