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Title Phantom formations : aesthetic ideology and the "Bildungsroman" / Marc Redfield
Published ITHACA : CORNELL University Press, 1996

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Description 1 online resource
Contents 1. Aesthetic Ideology -- 2. The Phantom Bildungsroman -- 3. Ghostly Bildung: Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre -- 4. The Dissection of the State: Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and the Politics of Aesthetics -- Postscript: The Trouble with Schiller -- 5. The Aesthetics of Sympathy: George Eliot's Telepathy Machine -- 6. Aesthetics and History: L'Education sentimentale -- 7. Conclusions
Summary Marc Redfield maintains that the literary genre of the Bildungsroman brings into sharp focus the contradictions of aesthetics, and also that aesthetics exemplifies what is called ideology. He combines a wide-ranging account of the history and theory of aesthetics with close readings of novels by Goethe, George Eliot, and Gustave Flaubert. For Redfield, these fictions of character formation demonstrate the paradoxical relation between aesthetics and literature: the notion of the Bildungsroman may be expanded to apply to any text that can be figured as a subject producing itself in history, which is to say any text whatsoever. At the same time, the category may be contracted to include only a handful of novels (or even none at all), a paradox that has led critics to denigrate the Bildungsroman as a phantom genre
Phantom Formations addresses the problem of the Bildungsroman through a rigorous examination of aesthetic ideology which explains the hysteria provoked by literary theory, clarifies the link between aestheticism and technologism, and questions the aesthetic presuppositions of the pragmatist and neo-professionalist ideologies of the modern bureaucratic university
Analysis Literature: history & criticism
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Subject Bildungsromans -- History and criticism.
German fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism
European fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism
Aesthetics, Modern.
Aesthetics, Modern
Bildungsromans
European fiction
German fiction
Ontwikkelingsromans.
Genre/Form Bildungsromans
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Bildungsromans.
Bildungsromans.
Form Electronic book
LC no. 96017186
ISBN 1501723170
9781501723179
0801432367
9780801432361
1501723189
9781501723186