Narcissism And Paranoia In The Age Of Goethe

"The analyses of poems, narratives, dramas, and critical texts by Moritz, Schiller, Herder, Tieck, Goethe, Lavater, and others shed new light on how progress in the medical, philosophical, and anthropological discourses of the time converge with aesthetic and literary considerations." "The volume illustrates how aspects of Freud's psychology have grown out of notions of subjectivity not confined to the Victorian age, as is often assumed, but with roots in the contradicting values of bourgeois emancipation."--Jacket.

New articles on topics spanning the Age of Goethe, with a special section of fresh views of Goethe's Faust.

The essays in this volume discuss critical developments in the philosophy, pedagogy, psychology, politics, and poetics of play around 1800. They illustrate that, in this time period, the parameters are set that continue to guide our debates about what are good rather than bad games or practices of play.

This work explores the status of psychoanalysis in Blanchot’s texts, from the early 1950s onward, elucidating the political and philosophical dimensions of Blanchot’s writings on madness, narcissism, and trauma.

While there are countless philosophical and psychological studies that focus on sources of the self, narcissism has found relatively little attention in a pre-Freudian context. The Self as Muse fills this gap by examining various aspects of narcissism and their significance for the outpouring of creativity in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century German literature. In many Eighteenth-century works of the period narcissism refers to the creation of an idealized image of the self and the desire to merge with this image. It provided an impetus for poetic production as writers resorted to the Greek myth of Narcissus to express what they perceived as the inner workings of their soul. Yet they were also acutely aware of the vain, and therefore narcissistic, motivations for their explorations of the self. While those influenced by the Pietist tradition attempted to distinguish between an 'unselfish' self-scrutiny and self-indulging vanity, others like Goethe took advantage of narcissism's creative potential and integrated it into their aesthetic endeavors. The abundance of confessional and autobiographical accounts, the burgeoning of poetry drawing on personal experience, the emergence of a type of drama that is based on empathy, and the concern with an individual's ability to control one's senses and emotions in general testify to an unprecedented interest in notions of the self in German literature. MathSs explains the emergence of narcissism in the literature of the period as a sense-inspired concept that aims to bring about a better comprehension of both the self and other human beings, and how writers used narcissism to improve the moral behavior of their readers. It examines eighteenth-century representations of narcissism against the background of Freudian and post-Freudian notions of the concept, and explores narcissism as a creative process that engages both reader and writer in the production of meaning. By showing narcissism's pervasive allure for a broad array of literary productions, MathSs shows that narcissism is a constitutive force not only in literary production but also in the construction of modern subjectivity. Yet this construction is by no means complete and invites the reader to strive toward the illusive image of an ideal.

Kant, Goethe, Schiller and other eighteenth-century German intellectuals loom large in the history of the humanities—both in terms of their individual achievements and their collective embodiment of the values that inform modern humanistic inquiry. Taking full account of the manifold challenges that the humanities face today, this volume recasts the question of their viability by tracing their long-disputed premises in German literature and philosophy. Through insightful analyses of key texts, Alexander Mathäs mounts a broad defense of the humanistic tradition, emphasizing its pursuit of a universal ethics and ability to render human experiences comprehensible through literary imagination.