Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Germanic Languages and Literatures

This dissertation identifies an intersection between language critique and biography in the early thought of Johann Gottfried Herder. Through an analysis of three works written between 1765 and 1770, I show that Herder uses the form of biography to arrive at a concept of living language and to critique modern languages against it. First, Uber die neuere deutsche Literatur (1767-68) presents a biography of language, an allegory that depicts German and other national tongues as forms of aging prose and, furthermore, sketches Herder's concept of well-formed prose as an animate, middle state of adulthood. In turn, Herder's biographical tribute to the author Thomas Abbt, Uber Thomas Abbts Schriften (1768), depicts well-formed prose on the level of the bourgeois individual, exposing the contradictions inherent in the concept of a harmonious middle. In the Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769 (1846), Herder reflects critically on the life of his own individual language and arrives at a new paradigm, a language of eternal youth. As I ultimately show, the coincidence of language and biography in Herder's thought enables him to conceive of – and perhaps realize – a German prose that is thoroughly alive.

Committee: A. May Mergenthaler (Advisor); Matthew Birkhold (Committee Member); Bernd Fischer (Committee Member); Robert Holub (Committee Member) Subjects: Germanic Literature; Linguistics; Philosophy