INCONTRI AL CORSO 18 is a series of events in which the scholarship holders, who live and work in Via del Corso 18 for two months, present their projects in an open conversation with Gregor H. Lersch, Director of Casa di Goethe, and the audience.
As part of her scholarship at the Casa di Goethe, literary scholar Sibylle Benninghoff-Lühl will follow Goethe’s botanical traces in Rome; Goethe speaks of his ‘botanical speculations’, as he describes them in the text ‘Italian Journey’ under ‘Rome, 2 December 1786’:
“… now began my botanical speculations, which I continued to indulge in the other day on a walk to Monte Mario, Villa Melini and Villa Madama. … The strawberry tree (arbutus unedo) is now flowering again as its last fruits ripen, and so the orange tree shows itself with blossoms, half and fully ripe fruits … There is enough to think about the cypress, the most respectable tree, when it is quite old and well grown. At the very least I will visit the botanical garden and hope to learn something there …”
The project focuses on Goethe’s description of trees, woods, flowers and leaves. It is a cultural and literary study of the traces that his diary-like travel notes lay out between literature and botany. Roaming through Rome, reading and leafing through the book of nature, the poet encourages the reader to reflect on a rhetoric of reading traces: his special collecting and archiving of flowers and leaves, literary shreds and shavings.
In Rome, the project also leads into concrete archives, above all the herbarium and the botanical garden. Here it becomes important what Goethe actually inspected, what he ‘speculated’, how and what he collected. The thematic arc is also drawn from Rome to Weimar when the project makes reference to Goethe’s natural history collection, especially his herbarium and his wood collection.
The event will take place in German language.
Sibylle Benninghoff-Lühl © privat
Dr Sibylle Benninghoff-Lühl (*1954 in the Lower Rhine region) is a literary and cultural scholar at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
She has been a visiting professor at several universities in Germany and abroad, including in Canada, Thailand and the Czech Republic.
Her current research interests lie at the interface of botany and literature as well as in the field of colonial literature and quotation research.
We would like to thank the Karin and Uwe Hollweg Foundation for supporting the scholarship programme.
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