This
collection of essays turns on a shift in Romantic studies from viewing
wholeness as an absolute value to critiquing it as a limiting construction.
Wholeness and its concomitant sense of harmony, rather than a natural given, is
a construct that was assembled and disassembled, theorized and criticized, by
diverse authors and artists in a wide variety of disciplines and
socio-historical contexts, and instrumentalized for diverse purposes. The
plurality of these constructions – that Goethe’s Urpflanze, for example, is not synonymous with Friedrich Schlegel’s
universal progressive poetry – is but one manifestation of how “assembly”
strives but fails to be absolute. The “other” of assembly referenced in the title suggests two divergent but inseparable tendencies: firstly, how a
construction can take on the appearance of a natural given; and secondly, how
assemblages of wholeness harbor within themselves their own principle of
disarticulation. These two tendencies underlie the “inexhaustible” character of
Romantic “gatherings”. As a construction passes itself off as nature, the
natural fails to account for itself as a whole. The scope of this volume
encompasses the establishment, mapping, and interrogation of assembly and its
other in German Romanticism through interdisciplinary studies on literature,
aesthetics, philosophy, drama, music, synaesthesia, mathematics, science, and
exploration.

List of contributors: Beate Allert, Frederick Burwick, Alexis B. Smith, Margaret Strair, Christina Weiler, Joshua Wilner.