Meryem Deniz wins the 2024 Goethe Society of North America Essay Prize

The award honors the best essay on Goethe, his times, and/or contemporary figures, written by a North American scholar or GSNA member. "In her highly original, timely, and lucidly written essay," the jury wrote in its commendation, "Deniz explores Romantic conceptions of matter. Novalis's 'elastic fluidity,' Deniz writes, allows us to understand that 'discursive elements such as ideas, thoughts, and concepts are less mental representations of things that precede their existence than spatiotemporal products of the entangled relationship between mind and object.' She offers a brilliant analysis of this method via a close reading of Novalis's Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, sketching out the connection between Novalis's ecological worldview and that of contemporary theorists of materiality such as Karen Barad. Deniz's intervention into Romantic materialist thought opens up exciting insights into the eco-political ramifications of mind-matter ecologies in Romantic thought."