Submitted by Michael Neininger on October 26, 2020 - 2:42pm
Last December, when I was looking through early issues of Modern Language Quarterly, I came across an essay by Richard j. Browne and M. C. Davis, "Goethe and the Yo-Yo," Modern Language Quarterly (1953) 14 (1): 98–101. It's quite brief and delightfully informative. The word yo-yo is a deformation of the French joujou, which means a toy, and it was invented in the late 18th century and fascinated Goethe. Jane has written about will-o'-the-wisps in Goethe's imagination and has now taken up the yo-yo as well, both of them as models for Goethe's version of dialectical thinking. It's a lovely example of how literature can bring together everyday experience and conceptual abstraction to teach and to explore the resources of being human.