Tiger, Advancing: Energeia, Adventure, Emergence in Goethe's Novella

In a reading of Goethe's exemplary Novella, the essay seeks to show that Juliane Vogel's study of dramatic entrances can be made fruitful for the analysis of narrative Darstellung. In this late work, Goethe creatively appropriates the premodern tradition of the aventure or & acirc;ventiure and redeploys it as a representation strategy. The Novella relates events in which elemental forces appear before the eyes of the characters. These forces are represented as advancing toward their spectators; charged with energy, they seem to be emerging from a background and approaching them. The essay analyzes the representational strategies and linguistic devices through which Goethe shapes these narrative scenes of advancing. Among them, the present participle plays a salient role. It is a means of grammatically forming energetic states and can be understood as a grammatical figuration of Goethe's concept of form.