Aesthetics of retrospection: Life narratives in Goethe, Rousseau, Moritz, and Keller

"Aesthetics of Retrospection" investigates the multiple roles of retrospection in the textual and theoretical construction of life-narrative genres: Bildungsroman, autobiography, and their hybrids. Retrospection is not merely a compositional principle of historical autobiography, but also constitutes the story that fictional and historical life narratives relate to the reader. Furthermore, retrospection is a central metaphor used in literary theoretical discourses to privilege fictional over historical narration and to legitimize the psychological novel's coherence and closure. By elucidating the interplay between narrative structure, aesthetic, and rhetoric of retrospection in life narratives from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, this work demonstrates that autobiography and Bildungsroman are rival genres presenting antithetical ways of investing an individual life with meaning.While Blanckenburg, in Versuch uber den Roman, validates the psychological novel by denigrating the retrospective topoi of autobiographical writing, Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre stages the rivalry between history and fiction as a competition between two mutually exclusive conceptions of time. In Part One, the thesis demonstrates how Goethe's young protagonist must exchange his initial view of time as a finite and self-enclosed whole for the modern conception of linear, unfolding, and open-ended time. Bildung is thus shown to be an apprenticeship in the apprehension and interpretation of temporality that requires an overcoming of autobiographical visions of closure. In contrast, Rousseau's autobiography engages narrative and rhetorical strategies to immobilize temporal progression and to construe life statically in terms of recurrence, prefiguration, and fulfillment.Parts Two and Three focus on two works that combine authorial biography and fictional plot in ways that defy generic categorization: Moritz's Anton Reiser and Keller's Der grune Heinrich. These works are analyzed as attempts to sustain both the idea of Bildung and the desire for autobiographical closure. This mixing of mutually exclusive generic and temporal models leads to significant compositional difficulties and to the failure of the protagonists' personal development. "Aesthetics of Retrospection" probes the ways in which generic indeterminacy, compositional openness, and unsuccessful Bildung interrelate, elucidating the inextricable connection between these "failures," the structures of retrospection, and the conflicting temporal apprehensions in life narratives.