Exploring the Interior: Essays on Literary and Cultural History

In this fascinating collection of essays Harvard Emeritus Professor Karl S. Guthke examines the ways in which, for European scholars and writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, world-wide geographical exploration led to an exploration of the self. Guthke explains how in the age of Enlightenment and beyond intellectual developments were fuelled by excitement about what Ulrich Im Hof called "the grand opening-up of the wide world”, especially of the interior of the non-European continents. This outward turn was complemented by a fascination with "the world within” as anthropology and ethnology focused on the humanity of the indigenous populations of far-away lands – an interest in human nature that suggested a way for Europeans to understand themselves, encapsulated in Gauguin’s Tahitian rumination "What are we?” The essays in the first half of the book discuss first- or second-hand, physical or mental encounters with the exotic lands and populations beyond the supposed cradle of civilisation. The works of literature and documents of cultural life featured in these essays bear testimony to the crossing not only of geographical, ethnological, and cultural borders but also of borders of a variety of intellectual activities and interests. The second section examines the growing interest in astronomy and the engagement with imagined worlds in the universe, again with a view to understanding homo sapiens, as compared now to the extra-terrestrials that were confidently assumed to exist. The final group of essays focuses on the exploration of the landscape of what was called "the universe within”; featuring, among a variety of other texts, Schiller’s plays The Maid of Orleans and William Tell, these essays observe and analyse what Erich Heller termed "The Artist’s Journey into the Interior.” This collection, which travels from the interior of continents to the interior of the mind, is itself a set of explorations that revel in the discovery of what was half-hidden in language. Written by a scholar of international repute, it is eye-opening reading for all those with an interest in the literary and cultural history of (and since) the Enlightenment

Exploring the Interior

"In this fascinating collection of essays Harvard Emeritus Professor Karl S. Guthke examines the ways in which, for European scholars and writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, world-wide geographical exploration led to an exploration of the self. Guthke explains how in the age of Enlightenment and beyond intellectual developments were fuelled by excitement about what Ulrich Im Hof called ""the grand opening-up of the wide world”, especially of the interior of the non-European continents. This outward turn was complemented by a fascination with ""the world within” as anthropology and ethnology focused on the humanity of the indigenous populations of far-away lands – an interest in human nature that suggested a way for Europeans to understand themselves, encapsulated in Gauguin’s Tahitian rumination ""What are we?” The essays in the first half of the book discuss first- or second-hand, physical or mental encounters with the exotic lands and populations beyond the supposed cradle of civilisation. The works of literature and documents of cultural life featured in these essays bear testimony to the crossing not only of geographical, ethnological, and cultural borders but also of borders of a variety of intellectual activities and interests. The second section examines the growing interest in astronomy and the engagement with imagined worlds in the universe, again with a view to understanding homo sapiens, as compared now to the extra-terrestrials that were confidently assumed to exist. The final group of essays focuses on the exploration of the landscape of what was called ""the universe within”; featuring, among a variety of other texts, Schiller’s plays The Maid of Orleans and William Tell, these essays observe and analyse what Erich Heller termed ""The Artist’s Journey into the Interior.” This collection, which travels from the interior of continents to the interior of the mind, is itself a set of explorations that revel in the discovery of what was half-hidden in language. Written by a scholar of international repute, it is eye-opening reading for all those with an interest in the literary and cultural history of (and since) the Enlightenment.

3. At Home in the World: Scholars and Scientists Expanding Horizons

The Emergence of the Idea of Global Education in the Eighteenth Century “The proper study of mankind is man” – but why include the exploration of the ways of New Zealand cannibals? In the second half of the eighteenth century Europeans had an answer: awareness of the world at large and its inhabitants would result in nothing less than a new, comparative understanding of human nature in general – and of themselves in particular. From about mid-century, scholars, scientists, and public intellec..

2. “Errand into the Wilderness”: The American Careers of Some Cambridge Divines in the Pre-Commonwealth Era

The Migration of Intellectuals Eighteenth-and nineteenth-century demographic events such as the “clearances” in Scotland, the potato famine in Ireland and the pogroms in Eastern Europe all had a significant impact on the national composition of the immigrant population of North America. However, the significance of these events tends to overshadow the fact that individual intellectuals, too, left their mark on the profile of its people, long before the influx of the 1848ers after the failed G..

Zweimal Palau : Imagewandel des Pazifikinsulaners in der Vorgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus

Der Kulturrelativismus Herderscher Prägung, der das 18. Jahrhundert weithin bestimmte, dann aber im späteren Verlauf des 19. durch die kolonialistische Zivilisationsideologie überschattet wurde, hat in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. erneut Auftrieb bekommen im Zusammenhang postkolonialer Interessenrichtungen. In der unmittelbaren Gegenwart werden jedoch auch Stimmen laut, die den "Kult der Kulturen" als Affront gegen die zivilisatorischen Werte Europas verdächtigen. So namentlich Roger Sandall in seinem Buch 'The Culture Cult' (Westview, Boulder 2001), das auch in den deutschsprachigen Ländern ein starkes Echo ausgelöst hat (vgl. Merkur, November 2002, S. 1024–1028). Die Vorgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus kennt diesen Konflikt sozusagen in Reinkultur

5. Opening Goethe’s Weimar to the World: Travellers from Great Britain and America

A Cultural Institution: The Travelling Englishman in Goethe’s Weimar As Goethe lay dying, his speech failed him; to communicate his last words and possibly his legacy, he raised his right hand and “wrote” words in the air – indecipherable, alas, except for one letter: W. Speculation about the meaning of this W has been a minor cottage industry ever since. The word so rudely truncated by the Grim Reaper – was it Wolfgang? Or Weimar? Or was Professor Richard Friedenthal clairvoyant when he gues..

Introduction: From the Interior of Continents to the Interior of the Mind

The essays assembled here view literature and literary life in the cultural contexts that emerged after the waning of the Middle Ages and the rise of the intellectual emancipation that culminated in the European Enlightenment. Prominent among these contexts is what the Swiss historian Ulrich Im Hof called “the grand opening-up of the wide world.” This was the sea change that Edmund Burke envisioned in a much-quoted remark in his letter of June 9, 1777 to William Robertson, the author of a jus..

4. In the Wake of Captain Cook: Global vs. Humanistic Education in the Age of Goethe

Expanding Geographic Horizons and “Who are We?” When Georg Forster lay dying in the Rue des Moulins in Paris in 1794, he fantasized about an overland trip to Asia he hoped to take, and just before his eyes failed him, they met a map of India spread out before him on his bed: not a crucifix (as had been customary for centuries), not Plato’s Phaidon (on the immortality of the soul), not an image of the youth with the down-turned torch (as one might have expected of a humanist) – but a map of a ..

8. Lessing’s Science: Exploring Life in the Universe

The Blank Spot on the Map of Lessing’s Learning Nature bored him, as an anecdote relates. When his attention was drawn to the approach of spring, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing is said to have replied that he wished the leaves would turn red for once instead of always turning green. Goethe found this so memorable that he recounted it in his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit. Like the Swiss poet and scientist Albrecht von Haller, Lessing’s lifelong partner in a lonely dialogue, Goethe saw the won..