Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman

Formative Fictions Series editor: Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Cornell University Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought publishes new English- language books in literary studies, criticism, cultural studies, and intellectual history pertaining to the German-speaking world, as well as translations of im- portant German-language works. Signale construes “modern” in the broadest terms: the series covers topics ranging from the early modern period to the present. Signale books are published under a joint imprint of Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library in electronic and print formats. Please see http://signale.cornell.edu/. Formative Fictions Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman Tobias Boes A Signale Book Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library Ithaca, New York Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library gratefully acknowledge The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the College of Arts and Sciences, Cornell University, for support of the Signale series. Copyright © 2012 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2012 by Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Boes, Tobias, 1976– Formative fi ctions : nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman / Tobias Boes. p. cm. — (Signale : modern German letters, cultures, and thought) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-7803-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Bildungsromans—History and criticism. 2. German fi ction—History and criticism. 3. European fi ction—History and criticism. 4. Nationalism and literature. 5. City and town life in literature. 6. Comparative literature—German and European. 7. Comparative literature—European and German I. Title. II. Series: Signale (Ithaca, N.Y.) PN3448.B54B64 2012 809.3'9354—dc23 2012016137 Paperback printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents A Note on Translations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Part I Methodological Background 1. The Limits of National Form: Normativity and Performativity in Bildungsroman Criticism 13 2. Apprenticeship of the Novel: Goethe and the Invention of History 43 Part II Comparative Studies 3. Epigonal Consciousness: Stendhal, Immermann, and the “Problem of Generations” around 1830 73 4. Long-Distance Fantasies: Freytag, Eliot, and National Literature in the Age of Empire 101 5. Urban Vernaculars: Joyce, Döblin, and the “Individuating Rhythm” of Modernity 128 Conclusion: Apocalipsis cum fi guris : Thomas Mann and the Bildungsroman at the Ends of Time 155 Bibliography 183 Index 193 A Note on Translations Most quotations are in English only. I have included the original German only where a translation seemed insuffi cient to illustrate my point. References are to standard English editions wherever possible, although I have sometimes silently modifi ed existing translations. All uncredited translations are my own. The original publication date of each primary source is given on its fi rst appear- ance in the text. For some of the less common sources, I have also indicated the German title. Acknowledgments As anyone who has ever written a scholarly book will be able to confi rm, the acknowledgments section is the academic’s equivalent of a Bildungsroman . Far more than a catalog of accumulated debts and favors, it also reveals the story of an intellectual formation and maturation. One major argument of this study is that formative trajectories are rarely uncomplicated, and that they usually traverse multiple possible communities, multiple ways of conceptualizing historical time. This has certainly been my own experience. My interest in the Bildungsroman was sparked by an undergraduate thesis on James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist that I wrote under the supervision of Ellen Stauder in the English Department at Reed College. Several years later, I returned to the topic when I began work on a dissertation that I eventually submitted to the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale University. Pericles Lewis and Carol Jacobs provided unfailing support and expert advice as my offi cial advisers; Katie Trumpener gave just as much of her time without the satisfaction of seeing her name on the project’s title page. I also benefi ted from many productive discus- sions with the other two members of my dissertation committee, Barry McCrea and the late Cyrus Hamlin. At Yale, Gregory Byala, Maria Fackler, Colin Gillis, Megan Quigley, Leonardo Lisi, and Johannes Türk provided additional feedback on individual chapters, as did audience members of the Modernist Studies Collo- quium and the Comparative Literature Open Forum Lecture Series. I signifi cantly reworked the project at the University of Notre Dame, where my colleagues Alys George, Vittorio Hösle, Robert Norton, and Mark Roche provided especially valuable comments. I am also grateful to Sarah Bearzi, Nicole Knight, Erik Larsen, I-Mei Ling, Javier Mocarquer, Abigail Palko, and Sara Troyani for their feedback during our spring 2010 graduate seminar “Fictions of Develop- ment.” An early version of my third chapter benefi ted from the kind attention of the Literature and Revolution Working Group at Notre Dame’s Nanovic In- stitute for European Studies, and I would like to thank both the institute and the group’s participants (Julia Douthwaite, Robert Fishman, Alex Martin, Pierpaolo Polzonetti, and Lesley Walker) for their support. I owe much of the most valuable feedback on my writing to scholars who kindly gave their time and attention without being prejudiced by shared institutional af- fi liations. Audience members at presentations that I gave to the German Studies Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, the International Society for the Study of Narrative, and the Modernist Studies Association helped x Acknowledgments me sharpen crucial portions of my argument, as did the faculty of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at George Mason University. Eric Downing, Stephen Kern, Todd Kontje, and Dennis Mahoney provided additional feedback in personal or written conversations. In the spring of 2007, I had the opportunity to cohost a seminar on contempo- rary approaches to the novel of formation at the annual conference of the Ameri- can Comparative Literature Association. Those three days in Puebla, Mexico, were among the intellectually most stimulating of my life, and I would like to thank all my fellow seminar participants: Ericka Beckman, Rita Berman, Maria Fackler, Enrique Lima, Maria Lima, Doug Mao, Joseph Slaughter, and especially Jed Esty, who has been a professional role model and mentor for the past six years. At Cornell, Kizer Walker and the editorial board of the Signale series gave early and continuous support for my work, while Marian Rogers helped me put the fi nal form to what I had written. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers of my manuscript. I would like to thank the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the Uni- versity of Notre Dame for its support of the indexing and publication of this book. The Institute also provided research funding for my project during the summer of 2008. An early version of my second chapter won the 2007 A. Owen Aldridge Essay Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association and subsequently appeared in Comparative Literature Studies , where it also won the 2009 Article Prize of the Goethe Society of North America. I would like to thank both the ACLA jury, chaired by Thomas Beebee, and the GSNA jury, chaired by Astrida Tantillo. An early version of the fi fth chapter appeared in ELH: English Literary History . The introduction and opening chapter also incorporate some ideas I fi rst formulated in a slightly different form in my critical translation of Karl Morgenstern’s “On the Nature of the Bildungsroman ,” which was published in PMLA . One way in which Bildungsromane differ from acknowledgments sections is that the former by their very nature delineate individual lives in sharp contrast to everything that surrounds them. Fortunately, actual lives are rarely this solitary. My parents and friends, central among them Aaron Carico, Denise Della Rossa, Johannes Göransson, Stuart Greene, Kate Marshall, Joyelle McSweeney, Ian New- man, Joseph Rosenberg, Jason Ruiz, and Yasmin Solomonescu at Notre Dame, provided me with the emotional support necessary to complete this project. Noth- ing that they did, however, can match the strength and companionship of Tracy Bergstrom, to whom I dedicate this book. Formative Fictions Introduction On December 12, 1819, in an auditorium at the University of Dorpat (now Tartu in Estonia), an obscure professor of rhetoric by the name of Karl Morgen- stern coined what would become one of the central terms not merely of German, but of world literary study: Bildungsroman . 1 The Bildungsroman , or “novel of formation,” is a kind of novel that focuses on the spiritual and intellectual maturation of its protagonist; for Morgenstern, as for almost every other critic since him, the paradigmatic example of the genre was Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–96). Morgenstern’s lecture is suffused with the spirit of romantic nationalism that erupted throughout Europe after the fall of

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