China in the German Enlightenment ed. by Bettina Brandt and Daniel Leonhard Purdy (review)

Abstract

clear, if Santayana’s text is imperfect, it is rhetorically magnificent in its imperfection and, as such, a useful foil for budding scholars. The section on Goethe’s Faust, for example, could easily serve as a usefully problematic commentary in an undergraduate seminar on Goethe. For the professor who wishes her students to see Goethe’s prophetic comprehension of capitalism, colonialism, and environmental destruction, Santayana’s text-immanent interpretations are a sharpening stone against which to hone one’s arguments. His essay reminds us that literary criticism, to the extent that it constitutes a phenomenological exercise, rises and falls on the merits of its rhetoric. He may have little new to say to scholars of these poets, but he says it so well that the experience of reading him is its own pleasure. Santayana’s essay appears in an MIT critical edition that comes equipped with an excellent introduction by James Seaton, as well as a set of useful appendices, including a chronology of Santayana’s life, extensive notes and a bibliography, and textual commentary, variants, and an index.