Narcissism and Paranoia in the Age of Goethe

by Mathas, Alexander

• ISBN13: 9780874130140
• ISBN10: 087413014X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-06-30
• Publisher: Univ of Delaware Pr

Summary

This is the first sustained book-length study that examines how literary narcissism in the Age of Goethe intersects with concepts of creativity, language, gender, and national identity, and how German writers anticipate the formation of the Freudian concepts of narcissism and paranoia. Beginning in the 1770s authors like Goethe, Herder, Schiller, Moritz and others created a highly self-reflective literature. Their poems, dramas, prose works, and theoretical essays provide insights into how these writers attempted to contend with uncertainties connected to the loss of faith in a universal order. The authors use literature to reflect a sense of certainty by creating a stable, idealized, and thus narcissistic self. The author shows that narcissism was particularly attractive to eighteenth-century authors because it could both capture and conceal the contradictions inherent in Enlightenment thinking. The failure to reconcile these contradictions often results in unbearably haunting visions that give way to paranoid delusions.

Author Biography

Alexander Mathas is Associate Professor of German at the University of Oregon.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. 7
List of Abbreviations	p. 9
Aesthetic Narcissism and the Bourgeois Self	p. 13
Herder's Notion of the Male Self	p. 22
Subjectivity and Eighteenth-Century Semiotics	p. 30
Outline of Chapters	p. 34
Self-Observation and Bourgeois Art	p. 40
Body, Mind, and Soul	p. 73
Mapping the German Body	p. 102
Male Desire in Sturm und Drang Drama	p. 125
Paranoia, Gender, and the Bourgeois Artist	p. 142
From Self-Perfection to Self-Delusion	p. 166
A Doppelgänger in the Family	p. 182
Narcissism and Cloning	p. 197
Notes	p. 211
Works Cited	p. 239
Index	p. 251
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