Chapter 5 - The Romance
Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2020
Summary
In a letter to Göttling of January 1929, Goethe compared the novel he was straining to complete to a “Sisyphean boulder” that he hoped soon to push over the summit and roll toward the public. Predictably, Goethe’s readers have for the most part merely scurried out of the way. Interpreters of the Journeyman Years, attempting to roll this great boulder of a novel back uphill to see whence it came, have all too often abandoned the Sisyphean task in utter frustration.
Numerous critics have turned to the Journeyman Years seeking a coherent formal or structural principle only to come away convinced that there is none to be found. In his history of the novel of the Age of Goethe, H. H. Borcherdt has given the Journeyman Years a chapter apart, as an anomaly; Hermann Broch and Ehrhard Bahr have seen the Journeyman Years as an “experimental novel” anticipating modernism’s total break with traditional genre forms.
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- Information
- Goethe and the Myth of the BildungsromanRethinking the <I>Wilhelm Meister</I> Novels, pp. 95 - 134Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020