Gebildet genug, um zu lieben und zu trauern: <italic>Bildung</italic> and irony in the literature of the <italic>Goethezeit </italic>.

Abstract

The term <italic>Bildung</italic> brings together in a single word the central preoccupations of late eighteenth-century German culture. It denotes a process of harmonizing particulars and universals within a teleological framework aimed at realization of some innate potential. My project's primary goal is to examine literary texts that subtly contest the ideology of <italic> Bildung</italic>, especially as it applies to childhood and human development. The first chapter looks at the history of the term itself, then at two contrasting pieces of children's literature that show the emergence of <italic>Bildung </italic> as a pedagogical paradigm, and finally at several short texts by Kleist for an ironic critique of Enlightenment and early Romantic views on childhood and education. In pedagogical theory, knowledge and the techniques by which it is transmitted are always supposed to be mutually enforcing. In disarticulating content and process, Kleist exposes the hidden authoritarianism and manipulativeness in teaching methods that purport only to develop children's natural capacities. The second and third chapters look at Goethe's <italic>Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre</italic>. Chapter Two approaches the novel by examining its reception, in particular on the part of two of its earliest and most influential readers, Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel. Walter Benjamin's work on Goethe and on symbol and allegory provides a conceptual framework for this investigation and for the reading of the novel that follows in Chapter Three. Schiller sees Wilhelm Meister's story as an exemplification of his theory of aesthetic education. Schlegel's reading is more complex, vacillating between an affirmative reading and one that emphasizes irony and challenges the possibility of the stable synthesis that <italic>Bildung</italic> promises. Chapter Three presents an interpretation of the <italic>Lehrjahre</italic> as a novel that indeed thematizes <italic>Bildung</italic> but also consistently confounds the expectations that contemporary readers would bring to such a narrative, to the extent that it can be read as a critique of the paradigm it has traditionally been taken to exemplify. I examine a number of formal and thematic elements related to issues of historiography, development, and aesthetics that cannot be assimilated to an affirmative account of <italic> Bildung</italic>. I also look closely at several characters whose life stories differ strikingly from normative models of subjectivity.