Forma literária e processo social: um estudo sobre Os anos de aprendizado de Wilhelm Meister, de Goethe

Abstract

The core of this work consists of a study on the relationship between literary form and social process in Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795-1796). Georg Lukács, in his well-known analysis of the Meister, identifies in Goethe's irony what could be considered the formal principle of the novel. This dissertation is therefore interested in understanding this formal principle and the elements of the historical-social reference that it mobilizes. The dissertation is divided into three parts. In the first one, we pointed out what Lukács indicates to be – both in his chapter on the Theory of the Novel about the Meister, and in his essay about it from 1936 – Goethe's irony and what it (in)forms about German society. In the second part, we observed the way in which Meister oscillates between “the poetry of the heart” and the “opposing prose of relationships”. In the third part, Wilhelm Meister's trajectory was addressed, following a close look at the narrative movements, through its articulation with the interventions of the Tower Society.