Novel Reading: Pedagogies of Form in George Eliot and Thomas Mann by Laura Day Wagner A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Michael Lucey, Chair Professor Dorothy Hale Professor Niklaus Largier Fall 2017 Novel Reading: Pedagogies of Form in George Eliot and Thomas Mann ã 2017 Laura Day Wagner 1 Abstract Novel Reading: Pedagogies of Form in George Eliot and Thomas Mann by Laura Day Wagner Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Berkeley Professor Michael Lucey, Chair This dissertation examines the intersection of novel form and questions of education in the novels of George Eliot and Thomas Mann. While each of the novels I consider structures its plot around the formative experiences of a young protagonist, whose development thereby constitutes both the arc of the story and the stakes of the novel, I argue that their concern with pedagogy extends beyond the diegetic representation of education to the form of the novel itself, in ways that are both continuous and in tension with some of their more obvious didactic workings. These novels put forth an implicit argument for the way that a novel can itself contribute to the formation of its readers: namely, by teaching them to be readers of novels, through a novelistic practice that sees form as pedagogical and pedagogy as formal. My first chapter traces the conjunction of form, formation, and the work of the novel in both the eighteenth-century German concept of Bildung, in which I locate the network of ideas that become crucial to my reading of Eliot and Mann’s pedagogy of form, and in Christoph Martin Wieland’s Geschichte des Agathon, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, which I read as forerunners of the self-reflexive novelistic practice that Eliot and Mann exemplify. Chapters two and three examine the way Eliot’s formal pedagogy informs and also challenges the explicitly stated realist projects of her novels. I argue that both Felix Holt, the Radical and Middlemarch displace the type of education that they initially seem to center— the political reform espoused by the eponymous Felix and the modes of book learning valued by Middlemarch’s scholars— in favor of modes of formation that they link to the novelistic, such as the sentimental and sympathetic lessons of their female protagonists, the novels’ own plotting, and the work of recognition and interpretation that they demand of both their heroine and reader. In privileging such acts of readerly formation, the novels don’t, however, put forth a monolithic definition of novel form but instead underscore the multiple, often contradictory modalities through which their own form moves and whose different demands they teach their reader to negotiate. In turning to Thomas Mann in chapter four, I examine Der Zauberberg’s explicit commentary on form in its meditation on the possibilities of Bildung in post-World War I Europe, and I argue that the “middle” way that its protagonist espouses serves as a description of both the novel’s own form and the pedagogic practice it represents and seeks to enact. An afterword to the dissertation suggests that such a middle space becomes synonymous with a model of novel reading that grows out of this intersection of novel form and pedagogy in Eliot and Mann’s work. i Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Preface iii Chapter 1 Form, Formation, and Novelistic Pedagogy 1 Chapter 2 Politics and Female Vision: The Aesthetic Education of Felix 23 Holt, the Radical Chapter 3 The Web and the Heart: Form and Education in Middlemarch 55 Chapter 4 The Pedagogic Urgency of Der Zauberberg’s Middle Way 85 Afterword In the Middle 119 Works Cited 122 ii Acknowledgments First and foremost, my sincerest thanks to my dissertation committee. From my earliest fumbled attempts to articulate this dissertation’s topic to the final iteration of these chapters, Michael Lucey has encouraged and interrogated this project in equal measure, and has helped me to identify and articulate what was most promising in it. Dorothy Hale is an exemplar of the type of reader I’d like to be, and these pages have profited enormously from the rigorous, generous attention that she has so consistently given them. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to spend these past few years thinking about novels with them both. Niklaus Largier has been an incomparable source of support from the earliest days of graduate school, and his synthesis of and questions about this project came at exactly the moment when I needed them. Thanks, too, to the many other teachers who have shaped me as a reader and writer, and especially to Winfried Kudszus, who helped me to develop the German side of this project, from seminar discussions through my prospectus, and to the incomparable cadre of instructors at Middlebury’s German School, who made it possible for me to study German literature in the first place. I’m particularly grateful to Manfred Koch, whose seminar on Der Zauberberg in the summer of 2011 first invited me to sink into Mann’s work. My enduring thanks to Leyla Rouhi, who first inspired me to pursue comparative literature and who continues to inspire me as a teacher. This dissertation is also the product of countless conversations with those whom I’ve been lucky enough to count as fellow scholars, teachers, and friends during my time at Berkeley. Thanks especially to Ashley Brock, Keith Budner, Kathryn Crim, Emily Drumsta, Jordan Greenwald, Katie Kadue, Marianne Kaletzky, Ramsey McGlazer, Julia Nelsen, and Jane Raisch. Life in Dwinelle and beyond would not have been the same without you all. Katie Fleming, Catherine Kelly, and Margot Weller were integral members of my first intellectual community at Williams, and their abiding friendship is something for which I remain daily grateful. Thanks to my students at U.C. Berkeley and the Prison University Project at San Quentin, who have thought deeply with me about the value of literature and education, and, in allowing me to help them in their quest to become better readers, writers, and thinkers, have in turn extended the same help to me. Thanks to Sandy Richmond, Erica Roberts, Tony Soyka, Anna del Rosario, and Kathy Barrett for making the Comparative Literature department run and for their tireless efforts on behalf of their students. My deep and abiding thanks to my family— Bill, Anne, John, and Hannah— whose love and lively conversation have fostered this project from long before it began, and to Lisa and Noah, who have broadened and enriched our familial conversation in the intervening years. I’m also grateful for the support of the family I’ve gained since the start of this project—Pedro, Charo, and Andie. And finally, I’m without sufficient words to thank Paco Brito, the first and last reader of these pages, who daily provides me with pleasures and edification far exceeding even the very best of the novels he so loves, and without whom this dissertation, like so many of life’s joys, would not exist. iii Preface In an 1880 review of Émile Zola’s Nana, Henry James describes the novel form in general as “a composition that treats of life at large and helps us to know.”1 This dissertation concerns itself with novels that care deeply about what their reader comes to know by engaging with their pages, but it more importantly seeks to answer the question that we might hear hanging at the end of James’s claim, asking not just what novels want their readers to know, but how they lead us to know it. The novels at the heart of this study are obsessed with knowledge. While there’s no clear indexical relationship directly linking their writing, the novels of George Eliot and Thomas Mann share an elective affinity with one another that is, I would argue, grounded in their central concern with the questions of education that this dissertation takes up. Both authors are well known for the scale of their work— not only in the sense of the page count of their novels, but also in the extent of what these massive tomes try to encompass within those pages. Beyond their detailed rendering of the social worlds they represent, novels like Middlemarch and Der Zauberberg detail their protagonists’, their narrators’, and their authors’ prodigious knowledge of and interest in diverse disciplines of study, social trends, historical events, philosophical issues, and more. A reader might easily be intimidated or even put off by the seemingly unlimited number of ideas with which these novels are in conversation, and the readiness with which their narrators dispense this wisdom and cast judgment on the people and issues that move through their narratives. Moreover, each of these novels in turn seeks to school the protagonist placed at the center of its story, and of the web of ideas with which that story is inextricably intertwined. In this, the novels are classic examples of the novel of formation, the origin of which I’ll turn to in the first chapter, their plots structured around the formative experiences of a young protagonist whose development— intellectual, social, moral— constitutes both the formal design and the ultimate stakes of the novel. But beyond these more obvious ways in which these novels are centrally concerned with questions of knowledge and pedagogy, I’ll argue that these novels crucially imagine and enact a mode of education that extends beyond the plots of development in their story-worlds: they put forth an implicit argument for the way that the novel itself can contribute to the formation of its readers.