Against the time

Authorship and Revolution in Goethe’s work (1795-1803)

Abstract

This article explores the notion of untimeliness as a defining feature of the temporal model adopted by the Weimar classicists, by Goethe in particular. It approaches the “untimely” as a premise and a practice that presupposes a movement of dissociation from the present time and from the author’s person. Based upon the article “Literary Sanscullotism” and the translation of Benvenuto Cellini’s “Life”, originally published in the journal The Hours (Die Horen), I seek to reconstruct the link between reactions to the French Revolution and reflections about authorship, and discuss the limits of Goethe’s “untimeliness” as a means for implementing artistic autonomy.