Culture and formation: Wilhelm Meister’s apprenticeship and Goethe’s disenchantment in front of world bourgeois

Abstract

We would like to present in this article a characterization of the historical context in which the novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796) from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was written. As the novel would become a center piece of the gender “self-cultivation novel”, the novel’s historical context help us to understand how did the German notion of “self-cultivation” formed itself from the historical experience of this nation. In particular, the crystallization of the German Bildung notion relates both to the position of the bourgeois “intelligentsia” in the German social structure and also with the broader context of emergence of the bourgeois world. The novel also relates closely to the social life of its autor. Therefore we will try to analyze the possible influences of it in the perspective that the novel presents of the emerging modernity. The reconstruction of the historical context is made form the work of Norbert Elias Civilizing Process, as well from the works of the historian Walter Bruford, The German tradition of self-cultivation: Bildung from Humboldt to Thomas Mann and Culture and Socitey in Classical Weimar 1775-1806.