SOURCE: Esterhammer, Angela. “Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Dialogic Situation, and Speech as Act.” Wordsworth Circle 27, no. 1 (winter 1996): 13-16.

In the following essay, Esterhammer focuses on Humboldt's conceptions of language and the reciprocal nature of the act of speech, suggesting that these provide a significant insight into the study of Romantic literary texts.

“Language, in the isolated word and in connected discourse, is an act, a truly creative performance of the mind,” declared the philologist Wilhelm von Humboldt in the 1830s (On Language, trans. Heath [1988], 183). Humboldt's dynamic conception of language has been recognized by twentieth-century thinkers as both typically Romantic and peculiarly modern. More than one scholar has referred to the period since 1930 as a “Humboldt-Renaissance,” and if Constatin Behler's claim that hearkening back to Humboldt has “almost become the fashion in twentieth-century linguistics and philosophy of language” is somewhat overstated (Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 63 [1989], 2), it...