Assembly and Its Other in German Romantic Literature and Thought

Thiscollection of essays turns on a shift in Romantic studies from viewingwholeness as an absolute value to critiquing it as a limiting construction.Wholeness and its concomitant sense of harmony, rather than a natural given, isa construct that was assembled and disassembled, theorized and criticized, bydiverse authors and artists in a wide variety of disciplines andsocio-historical contexts, and instrumentalized for diverse purposes. Theplurality of these constructions - that Goethe's Urpflanze, for example, is not synonymous with Friedrich Schlegel'suniversal progressive poetry - is but one manifestation of how "assembly"strives but fails to be absolute. The "other" of assembly referenced in the title suggests two divergent but inseparable tendencies: firstly, how aconstruction can take on the appearance of a natural given; and secondly, howassemblages of wholeness harbor within themselves their own principle ofdisarticulation. These two tendencies underlie the "inexhaustible" character ofRomantic "gatherings". As a construction passes itself off as nature, thenatural fails to account for itself as a whole. The scope of this volumeencompasses the establishment, mapping, and interrogation of assembly and itsother in German Romanticism through interdisciplinary studies on literature,aesthetics, philosophy, drama, music, synaesthesia, mathematics, science, andexploration.List of contributors: Beate Allert, Frederick Burwick, Alexis B. Smith, Margaret Strair, Christina Weiler, Joshua Wilner.