“Und die Schrift tönt”: Literary Hermeneutics and Sonic Fictionalizing

As part the “Soundtracks” lecture series, the German Department welcomed Dr. Rolf Goebel (University of Alabama – Huntsville) to the department on Friday, September 15. Starting from Friedrich Hölderlin’s late poem Mnemosyne, the lecture interrogated the uncertain ability of literary hermeneutics to decipher poetic representations of sound. At the point where this interpretive desire threatens to fail, musical compositions (like Peter Ruzicka’s Mnemosyne–Remembrance and Forgetting) may offer some meanings that the poem itself hides. But ultimately, it is the reader’s own attentive but idiosyncratic act of sonic fictionalizing that can imaginatively explore auditive significance in poetic texts that the written letter itself simultaneously discloses and conceals. This dynamic opens up new avenues for the mutually illuminating collaboration between literary criticism, musicology, and sound studies.

Rolf J. Goebel is Distinguished Professor of German, Emeritus, University of Alabama in Huntsville. His book publications include: Benjamin heute: Großstadtdiskurs, Postkolonialität und Flanerie zwischen den Kulturen (2001); and Klang im Zeitalter technischer Medien: Eine Einführung (2017). He is co-author of A Franz Kafka Encyclopedia (with Richard T. Gray, Ruth V. Gross und Clayton Koelb, 2005) and the editor of A Companion to the Works of Walter Benjamin (2009), as well as A Companion to Sound in German-Speaking Cultures (forthcoming). Goebel is also active as a non-professional organist and harpsichordist.