Idioms of Uncertainty: Goethe and the Essay by Peter J. Burgard

ISBN: 9780271008455

Penn State University Press, December 1992

264 pages, Hardcover

Goethe's essays have been culled for their literary, aesthetic, and scientific content, by the textuality and their location at the nexus of genre and literary history have not received the critical attention they deserve. In Idioms of Uncertainty, Peter Burgard analyzes the rhetorical strategies, structure, and style of pivotal essays and relates them to the essay traditions as represented by Montaigne and Johnson. By formulating the critique of systematic philosophy inherent in the essays and by investigating their participation in the principal aesthetic dialogue of the age―the Laocoön debate, which spanned nearly half a century―Burgard situates them in the context of eighteenth-century critical discourse.