1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910465142803321

Autore

Brown Jane K. <1943->

Titolo

Goethe's allegories of identity / / Jane K. Brown

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania : , : University of Pennsylvania Press, , 2014

©2014

ISBN

0-8122-0938-9

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (241 p.)

Collana

Haney Foundation Series

Disciplina

831/.6

Soggetti

Identity (Philosophical concept) in literature

Self in literature

Subconsciousness in literature

Subjectivity in literature

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Chapter 1. Representing Subjectivity -- Chapter 2. Goethe Contra Rousseau on Passion -- Chapter 3. Goethe Contra Rousseau on Social Responsibility -- Chapter 4. The Theatrical Self -- Chapter 5. The Scientific Self: Identity in Faust -- Chapter 6. The Narrative Self -- Chapter 7. Goethe’s Angst -- Chapter 8. “Es singen wohl die Nixen”: Werther and the Romantic Tale -- Chapter 9. Goethe and the Uncanny -- Conclusion. Classicism and Goethe’s Emotional Regime -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index -- Acknowledgments

Sommario/riassunto

A century before psychoanalytic discourse codified a scientific language to describe the landscape of the mind, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe explored the paradoxes of an interior self separate from a conscious self. Though long acknowledged by the developers of depth psychology and by its historians, Goethe's literary rendering of interiority has not been the subject of detailed analysis in itself. Goethe's Allegories of Identity examines how Goethe created the essential bridge between the psychological insights of his contemporary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the psychoanalytic theories of his admirer Sigmund Freud. Equally fascinated and repelled by Rousseau's vision of an unconscious self, Goethe struggled with the moral question of subjectivity: what is the



relation of conscience to consciousness? To explore this inner conflict through language, Goethe developed a unique mode of allegorical representation that modernized the long tradition of dramatic personification in European drama. Jane K. Brown's deft, focused readings of Goethe's major dramas and novels, from The Sorrows of Young Werther to Elective Affinities, reveal each text's engagement with the concept of a subconscious or unconscious psyche whose workings are largely inaccessible to the rational mind. As Brown demonstrates, Goethe's representational strategies fashioned a language of subjectivity that deeply influenced the conceptions of important twentieth-century thinkers such as Freud, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt.