Table Of ContentGoethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship and Philosophy
Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship and
Philosophy
Edited by
SARAH VANDEGRIFT ELDRIDGE AND
C. ALLEN SPEIGHT
1
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Eldridge, Sarah Vandegrift, editor. | Speight, Allen, editor.
Title: Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and philosophy / edited by
Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge and Allen C. Speight.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2020] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019058201 (print) | LCCN 2019058202 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190859268(hb) | ISBN 9780190859251(pb) |
ISBN 9780190859282 (epub) | ISBN 9780190859299
Subjects: LCSH: Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749-1832. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.
Classification: LCC PT1982 . G65 2020 (print) | LCC PT1982 (ebook) |
DDC 833/. 6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058201
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058202
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
List of Contributors ix
Introduction 1
1. Goethe as Philosopher 21
Eckart Förster
2. The Novel of Its Times: Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship on Life, Literature, and the New Tasks of
the Bildungsroman 35
C. Allen Speight
3. Narrative Direction: Novel Form and the Experience of
Contingency in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship 54
Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge
4. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister: A Tendency of Romantic
Philosophy 78
Elizabeth Millán
5. To Err Is Male: Bildung, Education, and Gender
in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship 106
Elisabeth Krimmer
6. Seeing Faces in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: Goethe
and Physiognomics 134
Martin Donougho
7. Agency and Embodiment in Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship 164
Charlotte Lee
8. Hegel and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship 186
Stephen Houlgate
vi Contents
9. Playing and Reality: The Constructive Powers of Illusion
in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship 214
Dorothea von Mücke
10. Going On: Philosophy of Continuity and the Writing of
Coherence in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship 237
Helmut Müller- Sievers
Index 269
Acknowledgments
Our first thanks go to Richard Eldridge, who initiated the idea for
this volume. His expertise and guidance hover in the background
of every aspect of this book. We are also particularly grateful to our
contributors for making this an exception to the “herding cats”
wisdom about edited volumes: all were communicative, prompt, and
above all receptive to feedback, making working with them an abso-
lute pleasure. We are indebted to the editors of die Drei: Zeitschrift für
Anthroposophie in Wissenschaft, Kunst und sozialem Leben, especially
Claudius Weise, for their generous permission to include here a trans-
lation of Eckart Förster’s essay “Goethe als Philosoph.” We are likewise
grateful to the anonymous reviewer at Oxford University Press for
a useful report that helped us and our contributors enrich the work
substantially. Further thanks are due to Oxford’s editorial and pro-
duction staff: Lucy Randall, who steered us capably through the sub-
mission and review process; Hannah Doyle, who handled everything
from permissions to PDF tables with aplomb; and copy- editor Leslie
Anglin and project manager Raj Suthan. Finally, there are numerous
teachers, colleagues, and friends who have shaped our thinking and
writing about Goethe, about philosophy and literature, and about the
broad “questions of human life” that we and others consider here: Karl
Ameriks, Matthew Birkhold, Nicholas Boyle, Jane Brown, Ted Cohen,
Stanley Corngold, Hannah Eldridge, and David Wellbery stand out
among them. Thank you.
Contributors
Martin Donougho is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy
at the University of South Carolina. His publications include
“Hegelian Comedy” (in Philosophy and Rhetoric 49, 2016), “Art and
History: Hegel on the End, the Beginning, and the Future of Art” (in
Hegel and the Arts, ed. Stephen Houlgate, Northwestern University
Press, 2007), “Must It Be Abstract? Hegel, Pippin and Clark” (in Hegel
Bulletin 28, no. 1, 2007), “Hegel’s Pragmatics of Tragedy” (in Idealistic
Studies 36, no. 6, 2006), “Marx, the Young Hegelians and the Origins of
Radical Social Theory” (in The Owl of Minerva 33, no. 1, 2001), “The
Woman in White: On the Reception of Hegel’s Antigone” (in The Owl
of Minerva 21, 1989), and “Hegel’s Philosophy of Action” (in Idealistic
Studies 16, no. 3, 1986).
Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge is Associate Professor of German at the
University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her first monograph, Novel
Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel (Camden House)
appeared in 2016. Her research has been supported by Fulbright and
DAAD fellowships. Other publications on pseudo-a utobiographical
confessions, on sentimentality, and on the popuarlization of
Enlightenment thought in so-c alled trivial literature have appeared
in Goethe Yearbook, Women in German Yearbook, Eighteenth Century
Theory and Interpretation, and Monatshefte.
Eckart Förster is Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University
and Honorary Professor of Philosophy at Humboldt- Universität zu
Berlin (Germany). His publications include Kant’s Final Synthesis. An
Essay on the Opus Postumum (Harvard University Press, 2000) and The
Twenty-F ive Years of Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2017).
Stephen Houlgate is Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Warwick. He has edited The Hegel Reader (Blackwell, 1998), Hegel
and the Philosophy of Nature (SUNY, 1998), Hegel and the Arts
(Northwestern University Press, 2007), and G. W. F. Hegel: Outlines
of the Philosophy of Right (Oxford University Press, 2008). His
