Kollektiv (Collective)

The idea of the ‘collective’ plays a key role in Goethe’s late work. It denotes a balance between multiplicity and unity, heterogeneity and homogeneity, which is characteristic both of Goethe’s authorship and of his literary work, above all his novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1829; Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years). Etymologically, Goethe’s use of the term refers back to its original meaning from the Latin colligere; for him, a collective emerges when parts are gathered and arranged into some sort of ordered whole. It has formal, intellectual, and social implications. The term is semantically close to the concepts of the ‘aggregate’ and the ‘compendium,’ which are also essential to Goethe’s late poetics. The collective, the aggregate, and the compendium are all situated between mere particularity and full systematicity, in a sphere of the intermediary. Finally, Goethe’s idea of the collective found resonance primarily and early on in the United States, specifically in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Going On

This essay investigates the philosophical commitments and the editorial means by which Goethe achieves the impression of narrative continuity in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Proceeding from a consideration of continuity as a foundational philosophical and aesthetic problem, Goethe’s striking decisions to establish and manage divisions in the novel’s text appear as concerted attempts to move the sources of continuity into the intradiegetic domain. The interlacing of various levels of interruption—between chapters, books, and volumes—creates a poetics of caesurae that helps explain the overwhelming impression of natural growth created by the first edition of the novel. A look back on the Lehrjahre from the perspective of Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and its scathing indictment of serialized publications further illuminates the interplay of philosophical, narratological, and editorial factors in the creation of the paradigmatic Bildungsroman.

O lugar de Goethe no alvorecer do socialismo

Resumo O artigo aborda a controversa relação entre o socialismo utópico e o Goethe tardio (1805-1832). Discute-se, na primeira parte, aspectos da história social de fins do século XVIII e primeiras três décadas do século XIX, enfatizando o socialismo nascido imediatamente das lutas da Revolução Francesa. Em seguida, a presença do ideário socialista em Goethe é ponderada a partir de exemplos extraídos do último romance do autor, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre oder Die Entsagenden (1829), e em asserções goethianas colhidas de diversas fontes.*