Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities / Die Wahlverwandtschaften, published in October 1809, is regarded as one of his most famous and mysterious works. The novel is a small encyclopaedia containing many of the themes, conflicts and experiences of modernity as well as bodies of knowledge that were of acute importance in German and European culture around 1800. The novel offers its readers an experimental ordering of love: ever-changing constellations of attraction in which four protagonists, two women and two men, connect with each other in a ménage à quatre. The author casts his protagonists into the world of (dis)ordered love which, in turn, gives rise to a debate about the relationship between divine and human order as well as about natural and political order. Using close reading and selected research literature, this course is an introduction to this novel, its representational logic and its historical and literary context.
- Teacher: Birgit Erdle