Goethe's Allegories of Identity / / Jane K. Brown.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Pennsylvania Press Complete Package 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Brown, Jane K.,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2014]; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Series: Haney Foundation Series
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (240 p.) :; 4 illus.

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Part I. The Problem -- Chapter 1. Representing Subjectivity -- Chapter 2. Goethe Contra Rousseau on Passion -- Chapter 3. Goethe Contra Rousseau on Social Responsibility -- Part II. Experiments in Subjectivity -- Chapter 4. The Theatrical Self -- Chapter 5. The Scientific Self: Identity in Faust -- Chapter 6. The Narrative Self -- Part III. The Language of Interiority -- 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