Eva Geulen: Stray Letters and Dud Shots: Some Reflections and one Strange Example

Lecture as part of the conference Traveling Forms – Practices, Politics, Potentialities organized by the NOMIS-Research Project Traveling Forms, 15–17 Jun 2023

When considering traveling forms in literature, what fails to migrate or travel also deserves some attention. In the first part I will offer some reflections on how such failures have been addressed and how they impact the notion of traveling forms. In the second part I want to make the case that Goethe’s “Faust” (of all things) should be numbered among non-travelling texts. Georg Lukacs’ Goethe-interpretation will aide me in this admittedly bizarre effort.

The literary scholar Eva Geulen is the Director of the ZfL, executive board member of the Centers for Advanced Studies in the Humanities Berlin, and Professor for European Culture and the History of Knowledge at the Institute for Cultural History and Theory of the Humboldt University of Berlin.