Four Models of Nineteenth-Century Narrative: Organicism, Dialectics, Tradition, & Genealogy
We will explore four distinct models of narrative form that crystallize in the course of the nineteenth-century. Our principal examples will be drawn from literature and philosophy, though related, equally innovative approaches to narrative can also be found in Darwinian evolution or in the later Beethoven’s transformation of musical form as open-ended and variational in kind. Our first model will be the organicist conception exemplified by Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796), his botanical writings, and his later collections of aphorisms.—Clearly building on that paradigm, though in crucial ways also departing from it, is the dialectical conception of narrative that Hegel sets forth in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), our next principal text.—Particularly surprising may be the marked affinities between the Hegelian, meta-discursive approach to cultural history and John Henry Newman’s account of the intellectual progression of theological reason in his Development of the Christian Doctrine (1845). Newman’s Development makes an eloquent and unabashedly anti-Liberal (though in no way reactionary) case for tradition as the most viable framework for cultural narrative.—We will conclude with Nietzsche’s very different anti-Liberal critique of nineteenth-century historicism and moral philosophy, which he conceives as a genealogical project in the Genealogy of Morals (1887).—Our discussion of these primary texts will be flanked by an array of critical readings, including selections from Terry Pinkard, Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Pippin, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Giles Deleuze, among others.
Requirements: One research paper (25 pp.) or two medium-length essays (approx. 12 pp. each)
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