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Against the backdrop of readings of Adalbert Stifter's 1844 Studienfassung of "Die Narrenburg" as an expression either of orientalist fantasy or of Austrian inner colonialism, this article traces the text's confusing geographies through its intertwined figurations of native and exotic plants. Often thought of (due to the etymology of vegetare) as idle, passive, inert, and mute, flora in this text suggests the tracks of colonial exploration and horticulture, as well as of orientalizing literature, and is implicated in the literary framings and formats that promote a nineteenth-century canon of "Germanness." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the canonical narratives and assumptions about German literature in German Studies. The authors argue that traditional German literary texts should be re-examined to focus on voices of difference, such as linguistic, queer, racial, religious, and sexual differences. The article discusses two major responses to the conservatism and dominance of canonicity: including neglected voices in classes and creating a counter canon. The authors emphasize the need for close re-readings of the traditional literary canon to decenter it and highlight the diversity of voices within it. The article includes case studies that examine how canonical texts juxtapose voices of difference from different perspectives. [Extracted from the article]

Starting from interdisciplinary theories of canon, this essay zooms in on literary canons and the canon of the field of German Studies in particular. In comparison to many kinds of canons, academic canons, it is argued, are structured based on different and frequently opposing assumptions. On this basis, a distinction is made between the adjective "canonical," which refers to the supposedly stable functions of legitimate or illegitimate authority, and the adjective "canonic," which evokes the specific forms of critical self-reflexivity required in academic contexts. The concluding discussion addresses the specific challenges of the canonic design of German Studies in the North American context. As an interdisciplinary discipline operating at a distance from Europe, the canonics of global German Studies are relatively undefined. This can be interpreted positively as a source of freedom and flexibility but also as a challenge of self-definition in relation to various disciplinary-canonic architectures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that Hölderlin develops a new understanding of canonicity by way of related concepts such as law, measure, and harmony. The final version of his novel Hyperion "bends" the straight rule of the canon—the metaphor underlying the notion of a literary canon—against itself, transforming it into a Heraclitean bow: a dynamic play of conflicting tones or voices. Diotima, the novel's female protagonist, has an especially important role in this transformation: not simply through her diffuse physical beauty, which flows out into her surroundings rather than being concentrated into a plastic form, but through her voice and above all her words, which correct Hyperion's own Platonizing interpretation of the Heraclitean doctrine—an interpretation that tries to conceive of the discordant unity as visual rather than radically acoustic and musical. This counter-Platonic reading of Heraclitus contributes to the political radicalness of Hölderlin's novel, which regards the agonistic polis, ultimately extended to include the relationship between human beings and nature, as itself representing the highest unity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Heine's 1851 poem "Jehuda ben Halevy" modifies Goethe's concept of world literature to make a place within it for the geographically dispersed, multilingual literature of the Jewish diaspora. Heine's efforts to imagine Jewish literature as world literature resemble those of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, which made explicit the political implications of Goethean world literature by likening the arrival of Jewish literature in a world literary canon to the achievement of civil rights for German Jews. The article argues, however, that Heine goes further than Jewish scholars like Michael Sachs and Leopold Zunz by suggesting that Jewish literature not only deserves attention as world literature, but that its transculturality and multilingualism anticipate it and provide a model for future thought on world literature. Heine's reflections in "Jehuda ben Halevy" indeed foreshadow contemporary interventions in the study of world literature regarding the status of medieval literature, untranslatability, and multilingualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]