THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO THE SEARCH FOR A VIEW OF THE WHOLE: MODELS OF COMMUNITY IN GOETHE, ELIOT AND MELVILLE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY JOHN U. NEF COMMITTEE ON SOCIAL THOUGHT BY PHILIP BENNETT SUGG CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JUNE 2019 For my parents, Ann and Keith Table of Contents List of Tables..............................................................................................................................................................iv Acknowledgements.................................................................................................................................................v Introduction. Individual Development and Integration in Nineteenth-Century Narrative..................................1 Chapter 1. Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre: Vocation, the Guild, and the Significance of the Individual Life..........................................................................................................................................................45 Chapter 2. George Eliot’s Village Humanism and the Life of the Nation............................................................138 Chapter 3. Clarel and the Community of Pilgrims........................................................................................................214 Conclusion. Criticism and Social Forms: Commune, Village, Pilgrimage..............................................................304 Bibliography...........................................................................................................................................................357 iii List of Tables Table 1. Topologies of the Wanderjahre........................................................................................................................64 Table 2. Spatial Hierarchy in the Wanderjahre...........................................................................................................81 Table 3. Temporality in the Wanderjahre.....................................................................................................................86 Table 4. Comparison of the Characters Makarie and Montan..............................................................................92 Table 5. Overview of Communes in the Wanderjahre...........................................................................................132 iv Acknowledgements For a task as difficult, as uncertain, and as long (in many senses!) as a dissertation in the Committee on Social Thought, a mere list of people to thank is not enough to convey the rich context of my day-in, day-out reliance on others. But given general fatigue, shortness of time, and the difficulty of writing acknowledgements worthy of the journey, I am afraid that these remarks will tend toward an incomplete catalog of names. In keeping with a theme of this project, let me make it clear now here that only a series of communities—some faded in the present and geographically dissipated from Chicago, others as vital as the beginning of graduate school—could have brought me to a satisfying resolution of my time here. Most people who begin any Ph.D. at the University of Chicago are advised that it will be a long and difficult project. And it is a truism that, to the extent we have distinct expectations going in, few of us achieve an end to a research degree that resembles what we foresaw at the beginning. Beyond these statements I can only speak for myself. The world has changed a great deal since I began this project. A fellow student once told me that the experience of being a student in Social Thought was like the plotline of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. To give a bit of background for this reference, the novel, set in an alpine Swiss sanitarium in the foreboding years leading up to World War I, concerns an impressionable young man, Hans Castorp, who journeys up the mountain for what should be a short visit to an ailing relative. But he stays. And he gets an education so deep and v open-ended that he forgets his prior commitments--and (almost) his prior life. When he finally leaves the mountain--at a point in time so different from the present that it was impossible to even imagine until it arrived--he finds that he has achieved something, but also been thrust back into a historical moment that (to put it both anachronistically and very optimistically) doesn’t know what to make of a person with his skill set! Much of this hits close to home. The world appears crazier than it has ever been in my lifetime. It is not (and probably never will be) looking for Social Thought graduates. But, if nothing else, I have made my peace with all that. A lot of things need to change about our world in the years ahead, and I am ready to make my contribution. For my part--unlike poor Hans Castorp--I am lucky in that I can still think back quite clearly to the beginning, before my time in graduate school, and have hope that those who helped launch me into my Ph.D. would still know what to make of me! We’ll see about the rest of the world. Thank you to my two most important mentors in my undergraduate years at Duke University, Thomas Ferraro and Thomas Pfau. In the intellectual presence that I maintain across the rest of my life, I can only hope to carry as much charisma, generate as much excitement, and create as many good memories for students and peers as Professor Ferraro. You taught me to seek out mentors based on all the right qualities. And I have Thomas Pfau to thank for making me aware of the Committee, and for guiding my undergraduate thesis. I don’t know what he would think of the intellectual that I have vi become today, but I look forward to showing him. His prolific body of work has become an even more important source of inspiration for me in graduate school and--to the extent we are still interested in the same things--a confirmation that I am onto something important. In the years between undergraduate and graduate school, thank you to Maya MacGuineas, for giving me a fascinating standpoint at the New America Foundation from which to observe the dysfunctions of the American and world economies during the financial crises of 2007-2009. And thank you to Anne Vorce, who had the patience to teach me how an economist thinks, although I had no significant experience with, or commitments to, the field up to that point. Her encouragement meant a great deal in the days I was deciding about graduate school as a life path. Although I did understand it until much later, my time in the think tank world of Washington, D.C. was important training of its own sort, and it informed my own critical understanding of what those in power mean when they talk about political ideals, social life, and community. From that time, thank you most of all to Marc Goldwein, for being such a good friend and intellectual partner to me that it was a very difficult decision to leave. Your pragmatism, intelligence, accomplishments and decency were an important early example of a peer making real contributions to the world. My experience in Social Thought has been one of exhilarating freedom, dizzying uncertainty, and increasingly aggressive attempts to put myself on a firm intellectual footing. In the early years, I learned from professors whose perspectives were both so powerful, and so distinct, that it was difficult to know what I was building as whole. These include, in no particular order, Robert Pippin, Lorraine Daston, Wendy Doniger, Glenn vii Most, David Nirenberg, Ralph Ubl, Laura Slatkin, Nathan Tarcov, Paul Friedrich, and Leon Kass. And of course my dissertation committee chairs David Wellbery and Hans Joas, about whom I will have more to say in a moment. Compared to the later stages of the proposal and dissertation, these were fairly straightforward years. But I would not have gotten through them had I not found peers, both within and outside the department, who became true friends. Many of them have by now left Chicago—a loss that I feel every day. For creating and fostering a real community, thank you to Robert Abbott, Jeremy Bell, Erin Burke, Lauren Butler Bergier, Anton Barba-Kay, Noah Chafets, Jon Baskin, Scott Bear Don’t Walk, John Ellison, Tobias Joho, Greg Freeman, Brickey LeQuire, Tamar Mayer, Hannah Mosher, Agnes Malinowska, John Paul Rollert, Dawn Herra Terry, Jason Rosensweig, Michael Subialka, Jonny Thakkar, Luke Parker, Austin Walker, Carly Lane, Drew Dixon, Lin Atnip, Paul Cato, Pablo Gonzalez, David Gutherz, Ben Jeffery, Chenxin Jiang, Jozef Mazernik, Julia Mueller, Andrea Ray, Joseph Simmons, Konrad Weeda, Danielle Charette, and Jamie McCormick. And thank you to my cohort, Alex Orwin and Anastasia Artemyev-Berg, for giving me a sense of continuity and a peer group, like I was part of a more conventional graduate school “class.” And thank you to Anne Gamboa, departmental administrator, for making us feel like someone noticed us on many days when the campus and halls of Foster were quiet, and we had only the solitude of our own work. If there is a price to be paid for the freedom of an interdisciplinary graduate program like Social Thought, then it is the difficulty of finding one’s way back to an intellectual foundation that makes the dissertation possible. This is already a huge task in a conventional graduate program, and I don’t believe I am overstating my case when I say viii that it is usually more difficult in Social Thought. In this very uncertain endeavor, I have, more than