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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 1995 From Idyll to Exile: The Transformed Self in the Early Works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Elizabeth Powers The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1442 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilmmaster. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. 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Contact UMI directly to order. A Bell & Howell Information Com pany 300 North Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor. Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 7 ? FROM IDYLL TO EXILE: THE TRANSFORMED SELF IN THE EARLY WORKS OF JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE by ELIZABETH POWERS A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Germanic Languages and Literatures in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 1995 UMI Number: 9530912 Copyright 1995 by Powers, Elizabeth All rights reserved. UMI Microform 9530912 Copyright 1995, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 ii ® 1995 ELIZABETH POWERS All Rights Reserved Ill This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Germanic Languages and Literatures in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. [signature] Johjf Gearey,- CJHAIR. OF EXAMINING COMMITTEE [signature] ^dhnGeareyV ' XECUTIVE OFFICER [signature] Fred Nichols Patrick Cullen SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv Abstract PROM IDYLL TO EXILE: THE TRANSFORMED SELF IN THE EARLY WORKS OF JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE by ELIZABETH POWERS Adviser: Professor John Gearey This dissertation examines works of Goethe's pre-Weimar period and his autobiography, Dichtuna und Wahrheit. which reconstructs that early period as the emergence of poet and oeuvre in terms of the abandonment of the idyll. It disputes the traditional view of Goethe as the poet of experience ("Erlebnis"). It seeks instead to demonstrate that Goethe wrote in the manner of his poetic forebears -- by the imitation of literary models -- and that "experience" was created in his work by emptying these models of their communal content. Once liberated from traditional literary forms, the new subjective lyric voice was literally homeless and its encounters with idyllic life forms were marked by ambivalence. The fragility of the idyll in Goethe's work mirrors the breakup of the idyll genre itself, and of genres and rules- oriented poetics in general, and it also inscribed in literature a new idiom, the main feature of which is the V assertion of the rights of the self over the demands of the communal order. The resulting poetic convention (rejection of fixed standards based on eternal verities in favor of endless self-creation and rootlessness) has had far-reaching implications for the course of literature since the eigh­ teenth century, particularly notions of originality, sincerity, creativity, and individuality. The works examined include the Leipzig poem collec­ tions; the pastoral play Die Laune des Verliebten: the poems "Wanderers Sturmlied" and "Der Wandrer"; the novel Die Leiden des iungen Werther: and the Sesenheim idyll of Dichtuna und Wahrheit. vi Preface When I returned to graduate school in 1988, after a fifteen-year absence, much had changed in Germanic and in literary studies in the U.S. It was indeed my sense of the differentness in the way literature had come to be talked about in the world outside academia that prompted my return, for I also sensed that the source of my dissatisfaction could be traced back to academic discussions of literature. I desired to learn why so much that I had regarded as giving value to human life had come to be not simply de-valued but occasionally derided. In the meantime, many of the things that disturbed me have come to the surface in American life. Upon my return I also did not dream that I would write a dissertation on Goethe, one of the most contested figures in German if not in world literature. The values that different ages give to poets can be appreciated if one compares the mountain of scholarship on Goethe in the nineteenth and early twentieth century with his relative neglect in the last thirty years. Here, too, however, I found myself out of step with prevalent views. Though it undoubtedly has much to do with the way the profession of letters forked off in two directions in the nineteenth century, into "interpretive" and "creative" sides, the adulation in which earlier generations of scholars held Goethe was associated with a view of literary creation that V I 1 I, as a writer of fiction, found untenable. According to this view, Goethe was the poet of "experience," a view that seemed to find confirmation in Goethe's own sibylline pronouncement that his works were "fragments of a great confession." Though the traditional view of Goethe highlighted the humanness of the work, the trust that the work could tell us something about life led, I believe, to improper expectations concerning literature. I had begun to discern in the view of Goethe as the poet of "experience" a link to the very issues that disturbed me most about contemporary academic practice. For it was by immersing myself in the literary world in which the young Goethe came of age, by bearing in my hands books with frail bindings and crumbling, yellowing pages, by reading lots of poems that can only be loved by a scholar, that I began to appreciate the extent to which Goethe was dependent on the models provided by his literary forebears. What scholars perceived as a new existential content in his work was produced by an earlier literary practice, the imitation of other poets. By demanding that a poet's work be about life, however, we inevitably judge it as we do other great practical efforts of the intellect (say, those of our contemporary statesmen and politicians!). We begin to ask questions like: why has it failed to address the problems of life? When literature gets drafted into the service of life Vlll (cultural studies), it follows that it will be faulted when it insists on being apart from life. Or, as in the case of Goethe, lacking the "right" (i.e., late-twentieth-century enlightened) view on late-eighteenth-century political and social issues, he is called reactionary. In the course of the past century many people have forgotten what poets of earlier ages knew, that creating literature (and to a great extent enjoying it) is about drawing on the resources of a literary tradition. Living in a democratic age makes the matter complex; a poet is no longer required to immerse himself in his people's history, myths, institutions, and culture to be taken seriously by his culture, or to have mastered every device thought up by rhetoricians in order to demonstrate his connoisseurship to that select portion of the population that considers itself the guardians of the literary inheritance. Instead, we take it for granted that the subject of literature comes from the "self." But after having abandoned an understanding of literature's constructedness, we now find that a dominant strain of modern literature is the emptiness of the self. Or the search for the self. Or the alienation of the self. But literature cannot construct our self for us; that is the task of life. If some people wish to read a lesson into literature, fine, but we really should be able to read The Sorrows of Young Werther without committing suicide afterward! The ix tendency to look at literature as life is to forget that it is the product of a human intelligence that sees the world around it in a way that is absolutely particular to itself. This human intelligence resides within a particular human being who occupies a unique standpoint in time, and thus it is not about people occupying other standpoints. We can enjoy literature only insofar as we, as readers, come to occupy a standpoint that is different from our own. To read literature well is to understand life from a point of view never vouchsafed us in "real" life.

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