Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations Arts & Sciences Spring 5-15-2016 Imagination, Emotion, and Adolescent Socialization in German Literature from Romanticism to 1901 Brooke Shafar Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds Part of the German Literature Commons Recommended Citation Shafar, Brooke, "Imagination, Emotion, and Adolescent Socialization in German Literature from Romanticism to 1901" (2016). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 798. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/798 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts & Sciences at Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures Dissertation Examination Committee: Lynne Tatlock, Chair Matt Erlin Jennifer Kapczynski Joe Loewenstein Erin McGlothlin Imagination, Emotion, and Adolescent Socialization in German Literature from Romanticism to 1901 by Brooke Shafar A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2016 St. Louis, Missouri © 2016, Brooke Shafar Table of Contents List of Figures ……………………………………………………………………………………iii List of Tables …………………………………………………………………………………….iv Acknowledgments ………………………………………………………………………………..v Abstract of the Dissertation……………………………………………………………………..viii Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter One: The Secret Life Unseen: The Miniature and the Imagination ……………………22 Chapter Two: Reading Readers Reading in the Nineteenth Century……………………………71 Chapter Three: Beyond Words: Imagination, Emotion, and the Inexpressible ………………..118 Chapter Four: Blurred Boundaries of Character Mind: Intermental Thinking in the Work of Hoffmann, Ebner-Eschenbach, and Reuter……………………………………………………..167 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………...205 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………209 ii List of Figures Figure 1: Hoffmann graph from Voyant ………………………………………………………..129 Figure 2: Reuter graph from Voyant …….……………………………………………………...130 Figure 3: Marlitt graph from Voyant …...………………………………………………………131 Figure 4: “Links” Visualization of Marlitt text centered on “ach” …………………………….147 Figure 5: “Links” Visualization of Marlitt text centered on “o” ……………………………….148 Figure 6: “Links” Visualization of Hoffmann text centered on “ach” …………………………153 Figure 7: “Links” Visualization of Hoffmann text centered on “o” …………………………...154 Figure 8: “Links” Visualization of Reuter text centered on “ach” ………………………..……158 Figure 9: “Links” Visualization of Reuter text centered on “o” ……………………………….159 iii List of Tables Table 1: Marlitt Data …………………………………………………………………………..134 Table 2: Hoffmann Data ……………………………………………………………………….135 Table 3: Reuter Data …………………………………………………………………………...135 iv Acknowledgments This dissertation would certainly not have come to be without the assistance and support of those around me. First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Lynne Tatlock. Her tireless encouragement has been both a comfort and an inspiration and she has often demonstrated an uncanny ability to provide that which I did not even know I needed. I have greatly appreciated her counsel and feedback not just on the many drafts of this project, but on the seminar work and comprehensive exams that started us both down this path. I am not sure anything that I say in English or German will properly convey my appreciation and gratitiude, so I will give it a try in Elvish: Ma serannas, lethallan. Ma melava halani. Jennifer Kapczynski and Erin McGlothlin have both contributed a great deal to this undertaking and I am indebted to them for their involvement. I have appreciated their willingness to serve on this committee, their careful reading of the dissertation chapters and discussing them together, and their humor and good cheer that makes working with them such a pleasure. Most importantly, I am grateful for their encouragement to do things I have needed to do but might never have done otherwise and to embrace avenues of academic inquiry that might have seemed too far afield. Thanks are also due to Matt Erlin, both for agreeing to serve as a member of the dissertation committee and for providing me with unique learning opportunities and funding through his participation in the Text Mining the Novel grant – experiences that have and will continue to shape my research. I am grateful to Joe Loewenstein, who has, in addition to agreeing to serve on this committee, positively influenced and supported me and my research via the Humanities Digital Workshop. I appreciated having the opportunity to participate in his Mellon seminar on the digital humanities. v I have benefited a great deal from my time spent in the Humanities Digital Workshop. To that end, I want to thank Doug Knox and Steve Pentecost. I learned a great deal from them, and that knowledge has served me both as a research assistant and for my own work. They consulted with me on the text mining project that appears in the third chapter of this dissertation, and I would have been unable to complete that portion of the dissertation without them. I have been fortunate to have great friends and colleagues at Washington University. I am grateful to Necia Chronister, Ervin Malakaj, Shane Peterson, Sarah and Erik Varela, Alex Wille, and Julia Wu, who helped me in various ways to find my way and feel at home here and who have more recently been supportive from afar. To Alex I am particularly thankful for our Sunday brunchtime game sessions and talks. Closer to home, Heidi Grek, Mikael Olsson- Berggren, and Claire Ross have been terrific and supportive friends; I will miss the dinners and trips to Three Kings. I owe a special thank you to Empress Sanders, who has always offered encouragement, a friendly ear, or a side-splitting laugh at just the right moment. I would be remiss if I did not express my gratitude to Laura McGee, who has remained a supportive and encouraging friend and mentor since I left Western Kentucky University. She is the reason I am here in the first place and I am always humbled by the fact that she still takes the time to believe in me. Finally, I would like to thank Jaina for her company during these last few years. Her affection, sass, and fierceness both confound and inspire me. vi For Hattie and Buck vii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Imagination, Emotion, and Adolescent Socialization in German Literature from Romanticism to 1901 by Brooke Shafar Doctor of Philosophy in Germanic Languages and Literatures Washington University in St. Louis, 2016 Professor Lynne Tatlock, Chair This dissertation explores the representation of imagination, emotion, and adolescent socialization in German literature of the nineteenth century, in both canonical and popular texts, beginning with the work of E. T. A. Hoffmann in the early part of the century and ending with Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks in 1901. I examine my topic through a number of lenses. The dissertation is divided into two parts, each with two chapters. In the first part, I show how these representations of character imagination and emotion are variously tied to historical questions of adolescence and socialization that appear in the literature of the period. In the first chapter, I analyze the importance of toys and miniatures in depicting imagination and emotion. As I show, disruptions in scale between these miniatures and the real world reflect characters’ struggles with the transition into adulthood. In the second chapter, I address books and the importance of reading and listening to texts; I show that “good” and “bad” forms of reading affect imagination and the maturation process. Concerned primarily with language and the construction of character thought and emotion, the second half of the dissertation traces how language affects the representation of adolescence. In the last two chapters, I use cognitive narrative theory and digital text mining to examine both the failure to express one’s thoughts and feelings and the viii blurring of boundaries between individual character minds. My investigation of imagination and affect in these texts sheds light on nineteenth-century understandings of socialization, adolescence, and the formation (and criticism) of social groups as reflected in literature – particularly the bourgeoisie; I am particularly interested in how these texts see questions of conformity – how the individual was meant to fit within the contemporary social world and how the individual chose to resist or question social norms. This dissertation shows how authors contributed to the modern, developing understandings of childhood and adolescence and tried to find ways to narrate the experience of this time of life, which was in some ways a new phenomenon. ix Introduction In the frame narrative of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Die Serapionsbrüder, storyteller Lothar is taken to task by the other members of the group after he recounts his fairy tale, Nussknacker und Mausekönig. His listeners are mystified by the uncanny elements of the story and assure Lothar that no child could ever understand the fairy tale and master