WERTHER&CO. NOMI, NOMENCLATURA E NOMINALISMO POETICO

The fact that naming is of enormous importance for Goethe's poetical works (and their understanding, too) is widely acknowledged. The essay, which tries to provide arguments for it, is concerned with three major aspects of Goethe's names: with 'deformation/distortion' as a general characteristic of the single name; with 'nomenclature' as the particularly interrelated way of their 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.