Daniel Carranza
Daniel Carranza joined the department in the Fall of 2020 as a Fellow in Germanic Languages and Literatures. Dr. Carranza, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, was appointed Assistant Professor Germanic Languages and Literatures in July 2022. Following is an interview about his recent and current work.
What is the focus of your dissertation?
My dissertation focuses on how Goethe’s poetic science of morphology shaped the emergence of German literary criticism around 1800 and continued to play a decisive role in twentieth-century methodological debates in the humanities. Goethe developed ‘morphology’ in order to identify structural resemblances among diverse organisms (enabling, for example, inter-species osteological comparisons) and to elucidate the formal continuity underlying their unruly transformations in time (as in vegetal growth). While scholarly discussion has centered on Goethe’s holistic conception of nature, I investigate how morphology as an ensemble of general practices of observation was applied with equal pertinence to the domains of art and society.
In what way are you reworking your dissertation research for publication?
For the book, I am interweaving three distinct levels of analysis that bridge between nineteenth and twentieth centuries: first, how Goethe himself applied (and thereby transformed) morphology’s observational techniques beyond the domain of nature to that of culture; second, how Goethe’s own contemporaries, such as August Wilhelm Schlegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt, productively inherited morphological approaches in their pioneering studies of world literature and linguistics; and finally, how morphological concepts live on in mutated form in twentieth-century theoretical debates, such as Wittgenstein’s critique of James Frazer’s Golden Bough or Claude Lévi-Strauss’s critique of Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale. My interest here is not simply historical reconstruction, but returning to nineteenth-century theorists in order to re-illuminate these more modern debates. I demonstrate, for example, how A. W. Schlegel practices an historically sensitive mode of literary criticism that does not merely prefigure Russian formalism, but dynamizes its more reductive, sclerotic methods of X-raying the poem into some variety of linguistic pattern.
My interest in tracking how Goethe’s morphology constitutes a chapter in the history of the human sciences inovlves more than antiquarian reconstruction. So many of the basic tools of humanistic inquiry involve working, whether implicitly or explicitly, with an operational distinction between form and content. This is the case whether one is an art historian describing a painting’s formal pattern, a literary critic giving an account of what a rhetorical figure is thinking through in a given poem, or, say, an anthropologist observing an exotic ritual in order to describe it (grant it intelligible form) later in a ‘thick description.’
How does your research on Goethe relate to recent work on 'form' and 'formalism' in the humanities?
A basic pedagogical adage holds that ‘form’ in an artwork is never akin to the wine glass that contains the wine (or content), giving it a subsequent predetermined ‘shape,’ but more akin to the wine press that first generates the wine (the content) to begin with. Recent scholarship in literary criticism has returned to basic debates between formalist and historicist approaches and sought a kind of rapprochement. Scholars in Victorian studies, for example, have devoted attention to how literary forms are always already historically fraught and come to index broader social dynamics. Indeed, already Barthes claimed that “a little formalism turns one away from history, but a lot of it brings one back to it.” Caroline Levine’s recent book Forms works in this vein, examining wholes, rhythms, and hierarchies as forms of social organization and not just literary tools. These recent scholarly discussions speak to a broader interest in a ‘new formalism’ that is robust enough to move past formalism’s maligned reputation as ahistorical and decontextualized, at worst myopic close reading. Returning to Goethe’s morphology, I would argue, allows us to envision what such a new formalism could look like, one that can closely read not only literary forms, but their vital intertwinement with forms of social and even natural organization.
What other projects are you working on or planning to work on in the future?
At the moment, I am involved in the second installment of the Goethe-Lexicon for Philosophical Concepts (or GLPC), where I am also an Assistant Editor. This is a new, peer-reviewed digital publication modelled on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and developed in collaboration with a number of international institutions and parallel philological projects, such as the Goethe-Wörterbuch. We’ve also organized a number of workshops, conferences, and seminars in Pittsburgh, Portland (OR), and Cambridge (UK), and have planned future post-pandemic meetings in Toronto and Zürich.
A second book is in the works on modernist authors such as Paul Celan, Georg Trakl, and Stefan George, but also non-German-language poets such as Lorca and Eliot. The focus here is on what I would call modes of poetic embodiment: of how poetry is meant to be incarnated, inhabited, or more simply lived when read aloud. Poetry’s origins most likely lie in ritual incantation or prayer, and this collectively shared, performative, even superstitious dimension of reading might seem to be lost in modernity (as well as in an academic context). I would argue, however, that key poems by these authors attempt to recuperate this ritual dimension of embodied poetic performance in an age of mass print media and modernization. In my own methodology, I’m trying to be attentive to this sensorial dimension of poetry in a way that opens a new avenue for historicizing poetic texts. In other words, attending to something like the sonic shaping of time in a poem by rhythm or rhyme need not turn one away from history or even merely reflect a historical context; it might instead itself interpret that context.
I am also involved in a collaboration with colleagues in Germany on transatlantic literary history, which spans German-language literature and its imbrications with US-American literature, but also the Latin American context. Ranging from Alexander von Humboldt’s exploration of the New World and Margaret Fuller’s translations of Karoline Günderrode and Goethe to Thomas Mann’s meeting with FDR and Stefan Zweig’s Brazilian exile, we are trying to understand what it means to write a history of literature that refuses to set limits drawn by national borderlines, instead taking an ocean (in this case, the Atlantic) as a space for reciprocal cultural exchange and interaction. This approach is well-known to historians and even the study of Anglophone literatures, but German literary studies has tended all too often to stay put within the cultural borders of a few nation states. Just the other day, for example, I learned that the poet Frances E.W. Harper, born in Baltimore as the only child of freed African-American parents, published a fascinating poem titled “Let the Light Enter” (1871), which revolves around the “Dying Words of Goethe.” Stephan Hermlin, an East-German translator, then featured this poem in his collection Auch ich bin Amerika. Dichtungen amerikanischer Neger (1948). These filiations – between Harper, an African-American female poet, and Goethe in the long nineteenth century, between Hermlin, an East-German writer, and Harper in a twentieth-century Cold War context – are fascinating and deserve to be carefully reconstructed and thought through. I would like to teach a course at Harvard devoted to transatlantic literary history, involving guest speakers from German institutions.