mûr”.
14. “never really embraced the Germans or their culture”, “Goethe was an exception”.
15. “J’ai joui ensuite avec Goethe, near to my soul. J’ai fini Les Années d’apprentissage de Wilhelm Meister; ces idées m’avaient rendu fou, et c’est dans cette disposition que j’ai commencé à écrire”.
16. “C’est le net caractère pédagogique du roman d’apprentissage qui semble lui conférer sa spécificité française”.
17. “Goethe’s novel was not only foremost in spreading the concept of Bildung but also in modeling the genre of the Bildungsroman (apprenticeship novel)”.
18. “The Victorian sages Thomas Carlyle, J.S. Mill, and Matthew Arnold imported the concept of Bildung as an antidote to the ills they diagnosed, each somewhat differently, in English society. The genre of the Bildungsroman was introduced through ←45 | 46→Carlyle’s criticism and translation of Wilhelm Meister and through his own Sartor Resartus”.
19. “would have been inconceivable without Herder’s influence”.
20. “was very likely the first to use Bildung to denote the education of man and mankind generally. He did so, as early as the 1760s, and in his famous Account of My Travels in 1769 (Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769) he sketched out a philosophy of Bildung”.
21. Véase Bell, Spinoza in Germany from 1670 to the age of Goethe (1984), pp. 38–70.
22. “Herder began seriously to work through Spinoza’s ideas in 1769. In his last years in Riga he devoted himself to an intense study of Leibniz’s Nouveaux essais (published in 1765), along with some of his earlier writings, and to the study of Spinoza in a Leibnizian context. Herder read Leibniz through Spinoza and Spinoza through Leibniz to find a philosophical mode for articulating his consistently naturalist insight”.
23. “Leibniz holds that the monad is isolated, windowless, and not susceptible of alteration by external sources. It is also this Leibnizian model of the soul that was found … to underlie Goethe’s Sturm und Drang works, in particular the poem Mahomets Gesang and Werther”.
24. “Leibniz’s philosophy also demands that each monad be a living mirror or representation of the whole of God’s creation – in this way the universal and the particular are said to coalesce, thereby adding to the overarching unity of God/Nature. Werther seems to feel the force of this demand … every time he confronts the intricacies of nature”.
25. “the Leibnizian conception of the individual as a rational soul or monad that must expand at all costs”.
26. “a rebellion against the narrow intellectualism of the Enlightenment, a defense of the rights of feeling against the hegemony of reason”.
27. “Werther suggests to us that when someone tries to develop into a full human being – ‘ein Mensch’ – and finds himself denied the social outlet for his energies, the upshot may be a catastrophic disjunction between self and world”.
28. “Goethe’s choice of the form of the novel in this instance stemmed from a desire to instil in the reader a will to resist Fate by means of Bildung”.
29. Wilhelm Dilthey comenta el Leibniz de Wilhelm Meister en su ensayo “Friedrich Hölderlin (1910)”, incluido en la antología Poetry and Experience (1985).
30. “[i]t is clear how Leibniz’s stress on the self-determination and evolutionary coherence of the monad could pave the way for Goethe’s concept of Bildung”.
31. “Werther shows what happens to the ‘windowless’ monadic soul, both socially and psychologically, when Leibniz’s preestablished harmony is absent, and when subjective, non-rational emotions refuse to recognize any Grenzen”.
32. “all the letters [are] written by one and the same person”.
33. “the threat of solipsism”.
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34. “protagonists as developed or gebildet by virtue of, and not as confirmed in spite of, the obstacles crossing their paths”.
35. “peripatetic meanderings and unexpected bifurcations that impel the protagonists towards reflexive transformation”.
36. “the progress of a young person toward self-knowledge and a sense of social responsibility”.
37. “not only in its episodic plot … but also in all the scenes in inns and roads, with their colorful gallery of rogues”.
38. “Werther … asks the reader not to behold from the outside a drama of tangled motivations and stratagems, but, rather to … imaginatively reenact the movements of a particular subjectivity”.
39. “aesthetic concretization”, “subjectivity per se”, “the per se of subjectivity”.
40. “is the monadic soul gone wrong – the individual who cannot adapt his internal emotions, longings, and desires to external reality”.
41. “the ‘windowless’ monadic soul” (Nicholls), “the conflict between the hero and society by suicide” (Anchor).
42. “the transformation of youth into maturity”, “the socio-cultural forms into which the novelistic hero is ceremoniously inserted at the novel’s conclusion”.
43. “knowledge of the self the model for knowledge of the world”.