Abstract

The notion of Bildung as it emerged in the eighteenth century links the rise of novelistic narrative to the concern with the self-perception and constitution of the human subject. If perceived as an uncontroversial principle of progress, whether in the sense of subjective cultivation or of an ultimate harmony between individual and society, Bildung loses not only its historical diversity but also its critical capacity. I propose to look at Bildung as an economy that thrives by projecting the contemporary crisis into an aesthetic frame and by deferring any ready solution. The telos of Bildung is difference and the prolongation of desire--that of the protagonist and that of the reader. The thematic, philosophical concern with Bildung orchestrates the coercion of heterogeneous desire into discourse, but at the same time disseminates this desire through multiple, albeit poetic, organs . ;The first section trails the ideology of Bildung from its Christian origins through the Enlightenment in order to show that whether the harmonious content of Bildung is maintained or not, a figurative, yet usually unacknowledged level supplements the expositional aspect. Fenelon's Telemaque illustrates this precarious situation of traditional narrative in that it denounces, for moral reasons, the deployment of pleasure through the art of narration. This tension becomes the driving force in Rousseau's Confessions. With the early Romantics, the secondary economy of Bildung, the deployment of control and desire, becomes the text-constitutive momentum. F. Schlegel's self-ironic, compared to Schiller's aestheticist-political idea, thematizes and perpetuates itself through the failure of Bildung, intellectual and self-inflating though this insight remains. While Wieland's Agathon ultimately fails to synthesize a positive morality with the recognition of the futility of perfection and harmony, Jean Paul's Titan manages to reflect the ideological character of Bildung without surrendering the epic content. By contrast, Hegel's nonpoetic response to the impasse of Bildung in the Phenomenology reminds literature of its public, communal task, turning Bildung into a mere episode in the self-realization of Spirit. In order to regain its critical potential, Bildung would have to be conceived as a propaedeutic of alienation