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Downloadable Pdf Document Cf View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository NARRATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN NOVEL Sandra Maike Christine Niethardt A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies.” Chapel Hill / Durham 2016 Approved by: Jonathan M. Hess Eric S. Downing Stefani Engelstein William C. Donahue Gabriel S. Trop © 2016 Sandra Maike Christine Niethardt ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Sandra Maike Christine Niethardt: Narration and Consciousness in the Late Eighteenth-Century German Novel (Under the direction of Jonathan M. Hess) The dissertation analyzes third-person hetero-diegetic narrators in three representative German novels from the late eighteenth century in order to illustrate the complexity of modern subjectivity at its emergence: Karl Philipp Moritz’s Anton Reiser: A Psychological Novel (“Anton Reiser. Ein psychologischer Roman,” 1785/86), Jean Paul’s Life of the Cheerful Little Schoolmaster Maria Wutz in Auenthal (“Leben des vergnügten Schulmeisterlein Maria Wutz in Auenthal,” 1793), and Johann Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (“Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,” 1796/96). The three analyzed texts stem from an era in which the notion of the modern autonomous subject came into being and each portray protagonists that one might characterize as modern subjects. Likewise, their narrators are usually seen as largely omniscient and authoritative. The dissertation calls into question this view of the novels’ narrators as representatives of modern subjectivity and counterparts to the protagonists whose lives they present. Instead, it shows that—despite the narrators’ self-representations as confident and self-reliant mediators of their stories and contrary to the equivalent impression their readers might develop at first glance— the narrators’ storytelling (the discours ) is changed by the content of the stories (the histoire ). iii That is, the narrative presentation of the protagonists lives and particularly of their psyche by means of psycho-narration changes how subsequent parts of the story are presented. While these changes in the narrators and their histoires manifest themselves differently in the three novels, the dissertation conceives of them as symptoms of historical changes taking place at the end of the eighteenth century and as expression of the insecurities and anxieties that accompanied the demands that were placed onto the modern, self-reliant, and self-determined subject in the wake of movements such as the Enlightenment. The dissertation puts forth the thesis that these historical changes found their way not only into the content of the experimental form of the novel (e.g., in genres such as the Bildungsroman ), but that they manifested themselves perhaps even more poignantly (and unintentionally) in the way stories were told. In stories that are presented by third-person narrators facing the subjectivity of an other thus becomes particularly apparent. iv To R. With so much love and gratitude. Du fehlst. Immer. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1: COMING TO TERMS WITH THE OTHER: THE NARRATOR’S STRUGGLE FOR AUTHORITY IN KARL PHILIPP MORITZ’S ANTON REISER .......................................................... 14 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 14 I.1 Moritz’s Concept of Erfahrungsseelenkunde ......................................................................... 21 I.2. Narrative Strategies in Anton Reiser ...................................................................................... 27 I.2.a With the End in Mind… Retrospection as Organizing Narrative Principle ............................. 32 I.2.b Deductive Induction : The Narrator’s Preconceptions as Organizing Narrative Principle ...... 35 I.2.c Speculative Empiricism: The Narrator’s Counterfactual Mode of Narration ........................ 42 I.2.d The Narrator as Pedagogue: Anton as Didactic Object of Observation ................................ 44 I.3 The Narrator’s Loss of Authority ........................................................................................................ 48 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................... 62 CHAPTER 2: OPEN WORLD – LIMITED BLISS: JEAN PAUL’S LEBEN DES VERGNÜGTEN SCHULMEISTERLEIN MARIA WUTZ AS LITERARY TESTIMONY OF AN ERA OF CHANGE .......... 66 CHAPTER 3: THE NARRATIVE NETWORK OF SPIEGELUNGEN IN WILHELM MEISTER LEHRJAHRE 98 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 98 III.1 Scholarship on Wilhelm Meister Lehrjahre : An Overview ................................................... 102 III.2 Fictitious Editorship before Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre .................................................... 119 III.3 Fictitious Editorship in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren ......................................................... 125 III.3.a Fissures in The Narrator’s Power of Judgment and Omniscience in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre ............................................................................................................... 128 III.3.b The Protagonist’s Construction of Meaning as Ongoing Process and Wilhelm’s Lack of Discrimination as Negative Model for the Implicit Reader ................................................. 142 III.3.c The Implicit Reader’s Bildung Toward and the Suspicion of Narratives .............................. 155 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 160 RÉSUMÉ ....................................................................................................................................... 161 WORKS CITED .............................................................................................................................. 166 vi INTRODUCTION Philosophers and writers dedicated to the Enlightenment envisioned the movement as being dedicated to free subjects from subjugation by external forces. They saw the reliance on the self as guiding authority as the foundation for their belief in the progress of humanity and the spread of the light fighting the darkness of superstition, bondage, and brutality of the Middle Ages. Kant’s notion of an autonomous subject that is daring enough to use and follow its reason envisioned a self that created and abided by its own laws. 1 Actual historical changes—the emergence of a capitalist economy and the bourgeoisie, the end of the estate- based society—as well as the weakening of church and state as controlling authorities did indeed grant the individual more freedom than ever before. But the light spreading over Europe and America brought its shadow too. As not only, but probably most prominently Horkheimer and Adorno have pointed out, the reliance on reason brought its downsides as well. Instead of the positive liberating changes the Enlightenment was meant to bring according to its representatives, it also alienated the subject from the world in which it lived—it rendered the “Entzauberung der Welt”—and developed itself into a new subjugating ideology. 2 As 1Cf. Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self. Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 298: “Kant’s organized the ideas of selfhood around the notion of autonomy; the self-achieved freedom by following the self-made laws of its own rational nature.” 2Cf. Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente (Amsterdam: Querido, 1947), 19-20: “Die Menschen bezahlen die Vermehrung ihrer Macht mit der Entfremdung von dem, worüber sie die Macht ausüben.” 1 Barbara Potthast so aply summarizes it, instead of setting people free it created anxiety and disorientation: Das 18. Jahrhundert gilt als Ära eines tiefgreifenden seelischen Wandels. Für die idealistische Geistesgeschichte stellt er sich im Sinne einer linearen Fortschrittsbewegung als teleologischer Vorgang dar, in dem das Individuum einen psychogenetischen Prozeß der Subjektivierung, Individualisierung und Gefühlsautonomisierung vollzieht – ‚vom Rationalismus über die Empfindsamkeit zum Subjektivismus‘. Jedoch, der Mensch dieser Epoche wird nicht nur aus der Bevormundung und Beherrschung durch Kirche und Staat, aus jahrhundertealten bedrückenden Ordnungen, Bindungen und Konventionen, die der kritischen Vernunft nicht mehr standhalten, sondern auch aus vertrauten, schützenden Werten, Ideen, Mythen und Bildern entlassen. Er wird tiefer Verstörung und Furcht ausgeliefert und soll doch aus sich selbst heraus kraft seiner Vernunft Selbstbewußtsein, Mut und Autonomie erlangen – dieser spannungsvoll-instabile psychische Zustand muß Brüche, Rückfälle, existentielle Bedrängnis und Sinnkrisen zeitigen.“ 3 As new spaces for the individual open up, filling them often becomes a destabilizing experience and overwhelming task. Kant was very well aware of this
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