Senior Fellow in Research Area 4: "Literary Currencies"

July 2025

Lichtenberg and Wieland: Critical Perspectives on the Veneration and Active Reception of Antiquity

Shinji Miyata's project investigates the reception of classical antiquity during late eighteenth-century Enlightenment through an analysis of two representative figures.

Lichtenberg consistently criticized the contemporary literary "fashions" of his time. Alongside the cult of genius, one of his main targets was the uncritical veneration of antiquity and the pedantry associated with it. In Lichtenberg's view, the unconditional canonization of certain cultural products and the uncritical reception of literary trends both reflect a blindness to a temporal and dynamic conception of humanity. His criticism of pedantry reached its peak in the dispute with Voss, in which the issue of translation in particular came to the fore.

Christoph Martin Wieland, who had intervened in this dispute with a proposal, appears to have offered an implicit response to Lichtenberg's criticism through his own approach to antiquity. Among his various engagements, his active reception of Lucian is especially worthy of in-depth study. He first translated Lucian's complete works, accompanied by detailed commentary (Leipzig 1788–89). He then developed his novel Peregrinus Proteus (Leipzig 1791), based on Lucian's The Death of Peregrinus, which he reimagined as an extended dialogue between Lucian and Peregrinus in the Elysium. This dialogue not only explores ambiguous passages in the original text but also offers a satirical critique of the cult of genius and the uncritical adoption of both ancient and modern knowledge. As a satire of intellectual trends in contemporary Germany, the novel can be seen as a continuation of Wieland's History of the Abderites, which similarly results from the skillful blending of a sharp contemporary perspective with a deep engagement with antiquity.

Through a comparative analysis of these two different attitudes toward antiquity, this study aims to contribute to the broader research project on the themes of canonization, circulation, translation and adaptation.

Shinji Miyata is Professor of German Language and Literature at the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, University of Tokyo. He served as President of the Japan Society of German Language and Literature (Japanische Gesellschaft für Germanistik) from 2019 to 2020. His research focuses on eighteenth-century German literature, with particular emphasis on late Enlightenment and early Romanticism, especially the writings of Novalis and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. He has published extensively on these figures and, in 2018, produced a critically edited and annotated abridged translation of Lichtenberg's Sudelbücher (Notebooks). His broader scholarly interests include the works of Christoph Martin Wieland, Albrecht von Haller, Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, as well as the philosophy of language in the eighteenth century.