Bücher der Reihe New Studies in the Age of Goethe

Reading Riddles: Rhetorics of Obscurity from Romanticism to Freud explores how the riddle becomes a figure for reading and writing in early German Romanticism and how this model then enables Sigmund Freud's approach to the psyche. It traces a migration of ideas from literature to psychoanalysis and argues that the relationship between them must be situated at the methodological level. Through readings of texts by August Wilhelm, Friedrich Schlegel, G.W.F. Hegel, and Ludwig Tieck Reading Riddles documents how the Romantics expand the field of poetic signification to include obscure, distorted signs and how they applied this rhetoric of obscurity to the self. The book argues that this model of self and signification plays a central role in the formulation of Freud's psychoanalytic theory. If the self is a riddle, as many in the nineteenth century claim, Freud takes the figure seriously and interprets the mind according to all the structures and techniques of that textual genre.

At the turn of the eighteenth century, selfhood was understood as a ';tabula rasa' to be imprinted in the course of an individual's life. By the middle of the nineteenth-century, however, the individual had become defined as determined by heredity already from birth. Examining novels by Goethe, Jean Paul, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, studies on plant hybridization, treatises on animal breeding, and anatomical collections, Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Heredity delineates how romantic authors imagined the ramifications of emerging notions of heredity for the conceptualization of selfhood. Focusing on three fields of inquiryinbreeding and incest, cross-breeding and bastardization, evolution and autopoiesisChristine Lehleiter proposes that the notion of selfhood for which Romanticism has become known was not threatened by considerations of determinism and evolution, but was in fact already a result of these very considerations. Romanticism, Origins and the History of Heredity will be of interest for literary scholars, historians of science, and all readers fascinated by the long duree of subjectivity and evolutionary thought.