Abstract

Through close analysis of works by Immanuel Kant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Heinrich von Kleist, my dissertation examines the poetics of the novella as a critical response to the historical imagination around 1800. I argue that the modern novella is the literary form that uniquely problematizes the possibility of integration. It emerges as a reaction to, and a critique of, teleological models, whose notions of progress and Bildung it evokes and questions. Focusing on the first stage of this process , I juxtapose two fictional stories and one philosophical-historical essay and claim that all three register, and react to, the crisis of teleological thinking. I analyze how this crisis is reflected in the texts' concerns with exceptional events and affects, and consider the narrative and conceptual strategies they employ to frame, fix, or amplify the irregularities they record. This leads me to discuss the texts' implicit or explicit notions of community, language, law, and subjectivity. ;My first chapter examines Kant's last essay on history, the second part of his Der Streit der Fakultaten . I argue that this essay departs from the previous philosophical discourse on history because in it Kant pivots the ideas of world-history and progress on a specific and singular event, namely on the German spectators' enthusiastic response to the French Revolution. I show how Kant construes this response as an ideal model of communication, and how he interprets enthusiasm as a harbinger of world-society. Drawing on other writings by Kant, I call attention to the ambiguous and potentially violent nature of enthusiasm, and suggest that Kant's models of history and progress rest on highly unstable grounds. The emotional instability provoked by the French Revolution is the subject matter of Goethe's Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten , which I discuss in my second chapter. I show how Goethe draws on the fame tale structure of traditional novella cycles in order to dramatize the Revolution as a traumatic event that exemplifies and accelerates the progressive separation of intersubjectivity from history, and how he employs storytelling as a means for containing the social and psychological disturbances provoked by this historical trauma. Kleist's "Michael Kohlhaas" , I argue in my final chapter, radicalizes Kant's and Goethe's models of history, language, and subjectivity. While Kant's essay construes enthusiasm as a sign of universality, and Goethe's frame tale uses storytelling in order to contain all excessive affects, Kleist's novella employs enthusiasm as a means of heightening partiality and curbing nationalistic feelings I examine the narrative strategies through which Kleist explores and exploits enthusiasm as a political affect, and show how his novella dramatizes, through the intratextual story of a soothsaying gypsy, its own propagandistic effects on Prussian politics