A View of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

PMLA ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irvin Stock
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
German Literature ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel

An enthusiasm for this novel is not, nowadays, an easy thing to share. Unless one moves in circles professionally devoted to German literature, the mention of its title is likely to call up among literary people the following notions: that T. S. Eliot has not approved of Goethe, while nineteenth-century England did, both facts still, to many, rather discouraging; that the Bildungsroman, of which Goethe's novel is the great example, is a sloppy and self-indulgent genre—there is no form, since it just goes autobiographically on and on, nor any proper commitment to experience, which the self-obsessed hero only passes through; that this one might be full of “wisdom,” perhaps, but that here is precisely its greatest fault, for what can wisdom be but smug “Victorian” moralizing or analyzing or generalizing, mere simplifying abstraction at best, and the death of all actuality, complexity, and charm. Nor is it fashion alone which accounts for the novel's virtual disappearance from our intellectual landscape. No, even when it is read it tends to be disliked. Press it on the up-to-date intelligent reader, the reader who devours the Russians or Stendhal or Flaubert or Proust with joy, and more often than not—such has been my experience—he will find it repulsively cold-blooded, even frivolous, in its treatment of human affairs. It is sometimes admitted that what happens in the novel, at least after the rather long flash-back at the beginning, ought to be interesting enough. But, the complaint is, one is hurried through even the big scenes at a pace that is shockingly sprightly. There is no sign that the author feels anything or wants us to feel anything. One is hurried on, moreover, to no particular purpose. Instead of “adding up,” the story rambles in the most outmoded way. And so forth.

German Literature and Thought From 1810 to 1890

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ritchie Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
German Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
German Culture ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Programmatic Statement ◽  
Poetic Realism ◽  
Concrete Reality

The present article discusses German literature and thought during the nineteenth century. Approaching nineteenth-century German culture, one needs to free oneself from several misconceptions that have proved surprisingly durable. One is that Germans were devoted to cloudy, theoretical idealism that stayed remote from concrete reality. It is commonly asserted that German authors favored the Novelle, rather than the novel; that they practiced a special literary mode called ‘poetic realism’; and that in contrast to the realism of Balzac or Dickens, German novelists specialized in an unworldly, introverted form of fiction, focusing on the inner development of the hero, which was termed the Bildungsroman. Two well-known episodes can serve as emblems of this commitment. One concerns Hegel (1770–1831) whereas the second emblem of German engagement with reality is the programmatic statement by Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886). An in-depth analysis of the influence of realism on German literature completes the discussion.

Faces of the Self

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-274
Author(s):  
Vanita Seth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Muslim Woman ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Face ◽  
The Face ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
The Individual

AbstractThis paper traces the centrality of the human face in the construction of modern individuality. It argues that the face of individuality no less than that of typology, is mired in and born of historical and political conditions that are subsequently disavowed in order that the individual (and the face she bears) is rendered a product of nature, an instantiation of the universal. Attempting to denaturalize and defamiliarize the authority invested in the face, this paper maps out three interrelated arguments: that the human face is historically produced; that its history is closely tethered to the production of modern subjectivity, and that its status as a purveyor of meaning relies upon the reiteration of preexisting norms through which it can be “read.” And yet, while this paper turns to the nineteenth century to trace the novel privileging of the face as an extension of selfhood, interwoven through this history is the figure of the “effaced” Muslim woman and the Muslim terrorist type.

Persuasion: Fellow Creatures

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pam Morris
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Narrative Perspective ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
A Chain ◽  
Porous Boundaries

Persuasion overtly foregrounds the self as embodied: physical accidents and sickness are recurrent. Sir Walter Eliot’s belief in the time-defying bodily grace of nobility is subject to Austen’s harshest irony. The transition from vertically ordered place to horizontal space in Persuasion is more extreme than in any other of the completed novels. Anne Elliot’s movement from social exclusiveness to socially inclusive possibility allows Austen to challenge gender and class hierarchies traditionally held to be inborn. Her writerly experimentation expands the possibilities of narrative perspective to encompass the porous boundaries of the physical, the emotional and the rational that constitute any moment of consciousness. Her focalisation techniques in the text look directly towards Woolf’s stylist innovations. A chain of references to guns and shooting gathers into the novel contentious contemporary discursive networks on class relations, notions of masculinity and the nature of creaturely life.

Hurry Up and Wait: The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and the Maritime in Modernism

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxwell Uphaus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Cultural Role

The burgeoning subfield of literary oceanic studies has largely neglected modernist literature, maintaining that the end of the age of sail in the late nineteenth century also marks an end to maritime literature's substantive cultural role. This essay outlines a way of reading the maritime in modernism through an analysis of the engagement with history and temporality in Joseph Conrad's sea novel The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). The novel depicts the sea as variously an anachronistic sphere left behind by history, an integral foundation to history, an element that eclipses history, and an archive of history's repressed violence. This article traces the interactions of these various views of the sea's relationship to history, highlighting how they are shaped and inflected by the novel's treatment of race. Based on this analysis, it proposes an approach to the sea in modernist literature that focuses on its historiographical rather than social import.

Epic and Novel

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 396-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Moore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
Big Picture

This essay explores a peculiarly Victorian solution to what was perceived, in the middle of the nineteenth century, as a peculiarly Victorian problem: the fragmentation and miscellaneousness of the modern world. Seeking to apprehend the multiplicity and chaos of contemporary social, intellectual, political, and economic life, and to furnish it with a coherence that was threatened by encroaching religious uncertainty, Victorian poets turned to the resources of genre as a means of accommodating the heterogeneity of the age. In particular, by devising ways of fusing the conventions of the traditional epic with those of the newly ascendant novel, poets hoped to appropriate for the novelistic complexity of modern, everyday life the dignifying and totalizing tendencies of the epic. The essay reevaluates the generic hybridity of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) as an attempt to unite two distinct kinds of length—the microscopic, cumulative detail of the novel and the big-picture sweep of the epic—in order to capture the miscellaneousness of the age and, at the same time, to restore order and meaning to the disjointed experience of modernity.

Identifying Ethics: Dysfunction as Representation of Societal Relationship in Ian McEwans’s Sweet Tooth

Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
A. Yacob ◽  
S. Veeramani
Keyword(s):  
Code Of Conduct ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Code ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Research Article ◽  
Ian Mcewan

In the novel, Sweet Tooth, McEwan has employed an ethical code of conduct called, Dysfunction of Relationship. The analysis shows that he tries to convey something extraordinary to the readers. If it is not even the reader to understand such a typical thing, He himself represents a new ethical code of conduct. The character of the novel, Serena is almost a person who is tuned to such a distinct one. It is clear that the character of this type is purely representational. Understanding reality based on situation and ethics has been a new field of study in terms of Post- Theory. Intervening to such aspect of Interpretation, this research article establishes a new study in the writings of Ian McEwan. In the novel, Dysfunction is not on the ‘Self’ but it is on the ‘Other’. The author tries to integrate the function of the Character Serena, instead of fragmenting the self. Hence, Fragmentation makes sense only in the dysfunction of relationship.

Le premier moment de l’art dans À la recherche du temps perdu de Marcel Proust – une « leçon d’idéalisme » ?

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-40
Author(s):  
Larisa Botnari
Keyword(s):  
Essential Role ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
The Self ◽  
Philosophy Of Art ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Philosophical Interpretation ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
Lost Time ◽  
Aesthetic Thinking

Although very famous, some key moments of the novel In Search of Lost Time, such as those of the madeleine or the uneven pavement, often remain enigmatic for the reader. Our article attempts to formulate a possible philosophical interpretation of the narrator's experiences during these scenes, through a confrontation of the Proustian text with the ideas found in the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) of the German philosopher F. W. J. Schelling. We thus try to highlight the essential role of the self in Marcel Proust's aesthetic thinking, by showing that the mysterious happiness felt by the narrator, and from which the project of creating a work of art is ultimately born, is similar to the experiences of pure self-consciousness evoked and analyzed by Schellingian philosophy of art.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document