Porous Borders / Border Controls
Porous Borders / Border Controls

Summary/Abstract: Borders imply a distinction between collective identity and collective difference. But attempts to draw borders – that is, to define the nature of what is contained within them, whether nations or historical periods or literary genres – often reveal their own inadequacy. For what they designate tends to be an abstraction, which cannot be fully reconciled with the complexity of an empirical reality in which the relationship between self and other, domestic and foreign, is not fixed but interactive. While citing various examples of this paradox, the article focuses on the German reception of Ossian and Shakespeare, by which both became generically national bards in the service of the cause of specifically German literary nationalism. In the ideologically overdetermined selective historicization of Shakespeare by J.G. Herder and A.W. Schlegel, in particular, we see the same tension between historical and normative criticism that has attended the conceptualization of Romanticism.

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