Roger H. Stephenson Orden de los libros

This book is a study of central aspects of Weimar Classicism, written in the light of Ernst Cassirer’s cultural theory. It provides a close reading of key texts, ranging across Goethe and Schiller’s œuvre as a whole, from their (philosophical) poems through their drama, prose-writing, and theoretical reflections on cultural and scientific topics. The work seeks to demonstrate the attested (but hitherto largely unanalysed) aesthetic power at the very heart of their writings, which in turn underpins their epistemological and ethical significance. The main theme of Weimar Classicism is the role of symbolism in Classicism, as distinct from the centrality of semiosis in competing cultural norms. The overall aim of the book is thus to see Weimar Classicism anew, both historically and analytically, as an enlightening context in which to reconsider many of the central tenets of contemporary (often called ‘postmodern’) cultural theory.

Examines the cultural context of Goethe's scientific work. This book looks at the distinctions he made between the amateur and the expert, the interplay between Enlightenment science and Romanticism's "nature-philosophy" and attempts to set his scientific thought into its context.

The significance of Goethe's aphorisms, verse maxims, and late philosophical poetry, it is argued, does not lie, as others have maintained, in any conceptual originality on his part, but rather in his aesthetic transmutation of commonplace thought. In his Maximen und Reflexionen and Spruchdichtung Goethe employed a novel mode of discourse that is neither poetry nor discursive prose - a mode of discourse which, because of its peculiar status, helps pin-point the border, so much contested in current literary theory, between aesthetic and non-aesthetic writing. His achievement is analysed against the background of the theory and practice of wisdom literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, viewed from the wider perspective of the contemporary debate on epistemological issues.