Werther & Co. Nomi, nomenclatura e nominalismo poetico

Abstract

The fact that naming is of enormous importance for Goethe’s poetical works (and their understanding, too) is widely acknowledged. The following essay, which tries to provide arguments for it, is concerned with three major aspects of Goethe’s names: with «deformation/distortion» (following the goethean suggestion of verzogene Namen) as a general characteristic of the single name; with «nomenclature » as the particularly interrelated way of their general functioning as an ensemble; and with a particular «poetic nominalism» in Goethe’s narrative prose as a result of the name’s status as poetical paradigm and model for a general symbolic mode which leads to fictional worlds where nouns mainly function as names (terms) and things appear to be signs (symbols). Consequently, also humans change their status, as shown by the astonishing fact, that there is not only one Werther in Goethe’s work, but many of them: Werther & Co.