Professor Cornelia Zumbusch (Hamburg), Poetic Metabolism: Energy and Form in Goethe’s ‘Fairy Tale’

As Chairman of the Mining Commission between 1784 and 1800, Goethe developed a keen interest in steam engines and smelting furnaces as well as in the ways and means to procure the necessary (fossil) fuels for both. As the talk will try to show, Goethe’s familiarity with mining business and the energy management involved resurfaces in his literary texts. In the Horen-Märchen (fairytale), published 1795 in Schillers journal Die Horen, a series of characters collaborate to unearth underground treasures. The enigmatic plot of the Märchen can not only be read as a comment on contemporary energy cultures; it also anticipates the thermodynamic concept of energy. Exploring metabolic conversions between the realm of the organic and the inorganic, the fairytale foregrounds the role of heat rather than the mechanistic law of gravity. As the figures are constantly talking, devouring something and thereby changing their shape, the fairytale also makes a metapoetic point: it recasts the traditional notion of a force of poetry as a model of energetic transformation by narration.

This is an online event, zoom link below. Everyone is welcome. 

https://durhamuniversity.zoom.us/j/97814252942?pwd=OXFLTnRWZlZPZkhteElETlVxbHN0dz09