Social networking in the 18th century was every bit as elaborate, dramatic, and rich a cultural phenomenon as it is today. Wilhelm Heinse's 1787 epistolary painter-novel Ardinghello and the Blissful Islands is an unruly and precarious literary-historical artifact, balancing on the thresholds between text and paratext, archive and translation, excess and omission, Renaissance and Sturm und Drang. Prof. David Gramling recently published a new article in The Germanic Review, which brings recent work on the gendered materiality of epistolary exchange to bear on long-inherited interpretations of Ardinghello, seeing in the novel an endeavor to imagine a rhetorical space for proto-gay identifications in late eighteenth century German humanism.
Abstract: Wilhelm Heinse's 1787 painter-novel Ardinghello und die glückseligen Inseln is an unruly and precarious literary-historical artifact, balancing on the thresholds between text and paratext, archive and translation, excess and omission, Renaissance and Sturm und Drang. This article brings recent work on the queer materiality of epistolary exchange (Garlinger 2005) to bear on long-inherited interpretations of Ardinghello, seeing in it an endeavor to imagine a rhetorical space for protogay literature in late eighteenth century German humanism. Since the 1990s, much effort has gone into studying queer structures and traces in Lenz and Goethe, and Simon Richter (2006) has suggested that Heinse's “revolutionary fictions” are perhaps best understood in this light as well. What remains undertheorized, however, is the structural relationship between epistolary disclosure and proscribed desire in Ardinghello, and a century of Heinse research has seen fit to minimize this particular aspect of his work. With its sidelong reference to Willa Cather's 1918 My Antonia, this essay shores up the consequences of upholding a non-epistolary interpretation of an epistolary novel—particularly in the domain of homosocial desire.
The article is available at: http://bit.ly/gckiaa
Prof. Gramling welcomes feedback at dgl@email.arizona.edu.
David Gramling's research interests include multilingual film and literature, Turkish German migration and literary history, theoretical approaches to monolingualism, transnational Berlin, literary translation and stylistics, gender and disability studies. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled The Invention of Monolingualism.