Overview

In the decades after its publication, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship served as a touchstone for such major philosophical and literary figures as Schopenhauer, Schleiermacher, and Schlegel, and was widely understood to be one of the greatest novels of the German canon. But in the decades and centuries following, the attention it has received in both disciplines has diminished in comparison to either Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther or his Elective Affinities. This volume follows the impetus of its early respondents to examine deeply what exactly Goethe's long and complicated novel is doing, and how it engages with problems and themes of human life. An interdisciplinary group of eminent scholars grapple with the novel's engagement with central philosophical questions such as individuality, development, and authority; aesthetic formation and narrative (and human) contingency; and gender, sexuality, and marriage. That these questions and their working-through in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre are in tension with one another speaks ultimately to how literature explores philosophical questions in ways that are open-ended, creative, and contain potential for new and different solutions to living with them. This unique philosophical approach to the form and purpose of a literary masterpiece illuminates new inroads into a novel at once famously complex and influential, and into the projects of one Germany's greatest writers.

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9780190859268

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Reviews

The volume is accessible despite what may be treated as dense subject matter, and it executes very well what the editors promise in the introduction. Each contribution reflects in different ways, implicitly or explicitly, on the tension between the particularity of Wilhelm himself and the universal lessons, concepts, and practices this particularity offers. The volume makes for an excellent contribution to the disciplines of philosophy and literary studies, with MA1/4ller Sievers' contribution expanding its reach to media studies, and would also be a very useful accompaniment to courses on Goethe and German literature. * Tanvi Solanki, Yonsei University, German Studies Review *

Author Information

Allen Speight is Associate Professor of Philosophy and former Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Boston University. A recipient of Fulbright, DAAD, and Berlin Prize Fellowships, he is the author of Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency (Cambridge University Press, 2001), The Philosophy of Hegel (McGill-Queen's University Press/Acumen, 2008), and of numerous articles on aesthetics and ethics in German idealism; he is also co-editor/translator (with Brady Bowman) of Hegel's Heidelberg Writings (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and editor of Philosophy, Narrative and Life (Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, 2015). Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge is Associate Professor of German at the University of Tennessee. Her first monograph, Novel Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel (Camden House) appeared in 2016. Other publications have appeared in Goethe Yearbook, Women in German Yearbook, Eighteenth Century Theory and Interpretation, and Monatshefte.

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