Images of identity : Goethe and the problem of self-conception in the nineteenth century

Bibliographic Information

Images of identity : Goethe and the problem of self-conception in the nineteenth century

Benjamin C. Sax

(American university studies, Series 1 . Germanic languages and literature ; vol. 57)

P. Lang, c1987

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Description and Table of Contents

Description

The word Bildung - variously defined as education or self-formation - came into popular usage in western Europe through the terminological revolution of the late eighteenth century. No single individual was more influential in giving his own definition to this key word than was Goethe. Through an analysis of Goethe's use of the term in the Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Goethe's autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, and the much neglected text Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, Sax shows how Bildung was more than a process of self-formation, for it included an understanding of the relation of the individual to society, to history, and through the interpretation of symbols, to a transcendent level of meaning as well. It is Sax's purpose to place Goethe's notion of Bildung within the context of the history of Western self-conceptions since the Renaissance.

Table of Contents

Contents: Through the analysis of Goethe's concept of Bildung, Sax reconstructs this term as a form of self-conception and relates it to the history of self-conceptions.

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