Imelda Rohrbacher: Poetik der Zeit. Zum historischen Präsens in Goethes Die Wahlverwandtschaften. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht — Vienna University Press, Göttingen — Wien 2016

It is rare that one comes across a study that changes one's long-familiar one's own favorite texts to such an extent that one begins to read the book in an exciting new way. That's what happened to me when I read a just-published interpretation of Goethe's The Elective Affinities penned by Viennese Germanist Imelda Rohrbacher. Today, as the triumph of the digital humanities moves toward quantitative textual analysis, this book seems a precious solitaire, combining the classical virtue of close reading with methodological innovation in the most blissful way. The new methodological approach owes itself to a sovereign interweaving of linguistic and literary linguistic and literary questions.