Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 79-12(E), Section: A.

Advisers: Rudiger Campe; Eva Geulen; Kirk Wetters.

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The dissertation studies the emergence of concepts of versification in German literature which continue to shape our way of reading versified texts. A joint analysis of poems and the poetological discourse at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century allows to identify functions of rhythm and meter in poetry that inform our interpretation of literature. In the mid-eighteenth century, poets like Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock attempted for the first time to produce faithful translations of ancient meters into modern Germany poetry -- only to discover that the meters of the Ancients and those of the Moderns worked in fundamentally different ways.

This insight provoked a quest among poets and thinkers for the origin and the nature of poetic rhythm that turned the discussion of metrical technicalities into far-reaching philosophical, aesthetic or political arguments. The problems at stake were various: the perception and representation of time and different modes of temporality, the question of how to conceptualize knowledge, or rather: how to think self-consciousness (in short: the philosophy of German Idealism), the interdependent formation of different art forms such as literature and music, or the ability of poetry to generate and to freeze motion. This study shows that these problems were disputed and, to some degree, solved not only in the poetological discourse but in the design of the verse itself. Each chapter presents close readings of texts by the following authors and contextualizes them within the larger poetological discourse of the time.

Klopstock' s poetry and poetics aimed at creating movement through metrical patterns. His poems about ice skating stage a precarious balance: the ice skater as poet inscribes his movements on the ice into the surface, thus producing metrical forms. However, his dance is menaced by a subliminal undercurrent threatening to break the ice from below, turning the poetics of autonomous verse motion into a threat to the poet.

Friedrich Holderlin continued Klopstock's enterprise of adopting ancient meters for modern German poetry, albeit with a different motivation: he tried to relate the poet's individuality to the metrical norm, attempting to create an individual meter. He pursued and finally abandoned this project in his hymn "Wie wenn am Feiertage ...".

Novalis shared with Holderlin the engagement with idealist philosophy. Two different notions of rhythm can be discerned in his texts: rhythm as a philosophical method and response to Fichtean thinking, and rhythm as the ancient metrical forms in Novalis' poetry. These two notions each entail different temporalities. Rhythm as `reciprocal determination' ("Wechselbestimmung"), on the one hand, aims at a coalescence of past and future into a self-liquidating present, rhythm as ancient meter, on the other hand, produces a concrete presence ("Gegenwart") by way of its own corporality.

The works of Ludwig Tieck allow to pursue the function of meter and rhythm in the literary genre of lyric poetry which emerges at the end of the eighteenth century. The aesthetic ideal of lyrical poetry --- a pure form devoid of any tangible substance -- is challenged by Tieck's way of versification which goes against the idea of a poetry of Stimmung.'.

Like Tieck in his plays of the early 1800s, Goethe experiments with an encyclopedic organization of a plethora of meters in the second part of his Faust drama. The ordering principle of his composition remains elusive even after a close metrical analysis as Goethe uses the same meters for disparate themes and roles, thus proposing an order that maintains a flexibility of its own. A final chapter on Friedrich Nietzsche's philological studies relates the eighteenth-century discourse on poetic meter and rhythm to twentieth-century aesthetics by expounding the notion of `Takt.' Drawing on ideas emerging around 1800, Nietzsche formulates `tact' as a concept that comprises both the mathematical rule of meter and the individual rhythmical deviation from it. Through this conflation of a mathematical structure (`Takt') with the sensitivity for individual forms (`Taktgefuhl'), Nietzsche's `tact' defies the common understanding of the term as the mechanization of an organic rhythm. It thus provides an alternative approach to meter and rhythm which forgoes the devalorization of a `mechanical' meter in favor of a `vital' rhythm and instead allows to employ their dialectics for the interpretation of versification.