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Literary Paternity, Literary Friendship From 1949 to 2004, UNC Press and the UNC Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages and Literatures published the UNC Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures series. Monographs, anthologies, and critical editions in the series covered an array of topics including medieval and modern literature, theater, linguistics, philology, onomastics, and the history of ideas. Through the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, books in the series have been reissued in new paperback and open access digital editions. For a complete list of books visit www.uncpress.org. Literary Paternity, Literary Friendship Essays in Honor of Stanley Corngold edited by gerhard richter UNC Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures Number 125 Copyright © 2002 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons cc by-nc-nd license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons. org/licenses. Suggested citation: Richter, Gerhard. Literary Paternity, Liter- ary Friendship: Essays in Honor of Stanley Corngold. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. doi: https://doi.org/ 10.5149/9780807861417_Richter Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Richter, Gerhard, editor. Title: Literary paternity, literary friendship : essays in honor of Stanley Corngold / edited by Gerhard Richter. Other titles: University of North Carolina studies in the Germanic languages and literatures ; no. 125. Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2002] Series: University of North Carolina studies in the Germanic languages and literatures | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: lccn 2001057825 | isbn 978-1-4696-5824-7 (pbk: alk. paper) | isbn 978-1-4696-5825-4 (ebook) Subjects: German literature — History and criticism. | Paternity in literature. | Friendship in literature. Classifications: lcc pt285 .l57 2002 . Introduction: Literary Paternity, Literary Friendship Gerhard Richter . : . Good Willing and the Practice of Friendship—A Dialogue John H. Smith . (): . Connotations of Friendship and Love in Schiller’s Philosophical Letters and Hölderlin’s Hyperion Walter Hinderer . German Classicism and the Law of the Father Peter Uwe Hohendahl . Allusions to and Inversions of Plato in Hölderlin’s Hyperion Mark W. Roche . How Fireproof You Are: Father-Daughter Tales of Loss and Survival Karin Schutjer . (): . Mediation and Domination: Paternity, Violence, and Art in Brentano’s Godwi John Lyon . Old Father Jupiter: On Kleist’s Drama Amphitryon Gerhard Kurz . Two Lovers, Three Friends Jochen Hörisch viii : . . The Love That Is Called Friendship and the Rise of Sexual Identity Robert Tobin . Of National Poets and Their Female Companions Herman Rapaport . Between Aufbruch and Secessio: Images of Friendship among Germans, Jews, and Gays John Neubauer . Women’s Comedy and Its Intellectual Fathers: Marx as the Answer to Freud Gail Finney . , : . Friendship and Responsibility: Arendt to Auden David Halliburton . On Friendship in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt Reads Walter Benjamin Liliane Weissberg . : . Odysseus’s Tattoo: On Daniel Ganzfried’s The Sender and Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments Rafaël Newman and Caroline Wiedmer . Of Friends and Mentors Donald Brown . Shprintze, or Metathesis: On the Rhetoric of the Fathers in Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman Howard Stern . Middlebrowbeat Laurence A. Rickels . The Democratic Father (Credit and Crime in Metaphor) A. Kiarina Kordela . The Shadow of the Modern: Gothic Ghosts in Stoker’s Dracula and Kafka’s Amerika Mark M. Anderson :ix Selected Bibliography of Works of Stanley Corngold Princeton Dissertations in German and Comparative Literature Directed by Stanley Corngold Contributors Literary Paternity, Literary Friendship The text can be read without its father’s guarantee. —Roland Barthes Introduction Literary Paternity, Literary Friendship Ich glaube, Du hast es nicht genug begriffen, daß Schreiben meine einzige innere Daseinsmöglichkeit ist. —Franz Kafka, in a letter to Felice Bauer, April From any perspective, Stanley Corngold, whose life and achievements as a scholar, teacher, and friend the following essays celebrate, is an exception. He is an exception in these times of methodological dogma and professed certainty not only because he approaches both his work and his empirical life with an uncommon curiosity and infectious openness but also because, more than most scholars, he works to keep his ideas and perspectives perpetually in strategic flux. This fluidity of thinking and writing, which grows out of a sense of responsibility to the difficulty of his objects of study, is only matched by the rigor and intellectual integrity that also have come to be his trademark. Ian Balfour puts it well apropos of Corngold’s most recent book, Complex Pleasures: Forms of Feeling in German Litera- ture (), when he writes that ‘‘elegance and intelligence meet on virtually every page,’’ while the ‘‘prose is pellucid, flexible, and sinuous at the same time.’’1 From the perspective of the productive tensions that traverse all his writings, the idea of a Festschrift is almost an oxymoron—at least when one hears in this word not only the denotation of a worthy feast but also the echoes of festschreiben, to arrest something in writing for good. After all, one of the lessons of Corngold’s work is that there is very little that is fest- geschrieben once and for all, that does not deserve to be carefully reread and passionately rethought, again and again. This rereading and rethinking is propelled by an ethical impulse—the cura, which Heidegger tells us lies at the heart of all worry—that contents itself neither with the received wis- dom of conventional disciplinary perspectives nor with the false promise of closure offered by this or that system. : The essays gathered in this volume honor Stanley Corngold by focus- ing on the twin problems of literary friendship and literary paternity. It is appropriate that these twin themes should stand at the core of a volume in his honor, both because he has addressed them in his variegated critical writings and because these tropes conspire to yield a perspective from which many of his more general intellectual concerns come metonymically into view. Corngold’s celebrated work on Franz Kafka, for instance, includes meditations, directly or indirectly, on questions of friendship and paternity, relation and offspring, proximity and distance. Moreover, honoring Corn- gold, who has always been both highly aware of, and vigilantly guarded vis-à-vis, the most recent developments in critical theory, with a volume on these twin themes is particularly timely in the current critical situation. Here, the problems of friendship and paternity occupy a central position in discussions of ethics, politics, art, and literature, as well as the relationship between the public and the private sphere. One could even say that with the numerous publications of books and essays on these topics, paternity and friendship have become privileged tropes in contemporary critical and historical debates.2 While friendship has been a central issue in the history of Western ethical and political discourses in philosophy and literature—from Plato and Cicero via Montaigne, Bacon, and Kant all the way to Nietzsche, Freud, Sim- mel, Blanchot, and beyond—it has only recently begun to become visible as a sphere in which to consider the possibility of a subject that strives to act ethically and responsibly, even without recourse to an essential ground- edness or a stable metanarrative. The subject of friendship emerges in contemporary theory, for example, in Jacques Derrida’s recent ThePoliticsof Friendship, as constantly confronted with an otherness, an alterity that tra- verses even the self. As such, it provides a prime territory in which to re- articulate such contested notions as community, democracy, and responsibility. Paternity, like friendship, has a long literary and philosophical history, from Plato’s Phaedrus—where it is discussed in its relation to writing— through Nietzsche and Kafka to the postmodernists. Concrete and meta- phoric paternity allows us to raise essential questions about the status of the ‘‘origin,’’ the ethics and politics of responsible production, the status of the ‘‘author,’’ the empirical versus the simulated or written personality, the discourse of disowning, constructions of the self through an other, the : concept of reproduction, the relation of failed (literary) paternity to the sublimations of destruction, and the ideological attempts to differentiate between proper offspring and bastard forms. Corngold himself has ener- getically contributed to these debates, both in the form of regular semi- nars at Princeton University, where students eagerly flock to his course on ‘‘Literary Paternity: Nietzsche, Kafka, Benjamin,’’ and in the form of essays addressed to a wider scholarly community, most recently in his work on ‘‘Nietzsche, Kafka, and Literary Paternity.’’3 In this regard, the essays that follow not only address but perform the topic of this volume: the texts written by Corngold’s friends and colleagues implicitly enact what is at stake in friendship, while the contributions by his former students, whether their explicit topic is friendship or paternity, are implicated in the structure of a certain literary paternity. To pay tribute to Stanley Corngold

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