Drawing by Dante Prado
Dante Prado’s “La obediencia y la perspectiva narrativa en Los años de aprendizaje de Wilhelm Meister [Obedience and Narrative Perspective in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Years]” was published in Exlibris Number 12, 2023.
Dante is a first-year PhD student in the Germanic Studies program in the Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies. The abstract in English reads:
“Recently, obedience has become a prominent research object in German Studies, with multiple works exploring the role of obedience in 18th-century German literature. These studies reflect on the content and the degree of genre adaptation of distinct texts of the Goethezeit (1770-1830). Attending these debates and following Wolf Schmid’s model of narrative perspective (2014), I argue that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Years (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 1795/96) articulates a poetics of obedience. Specifically, the narrative perspective of the novel reveals that the Goethean narrator impedes the contact between the reader and the hero’s perspective because the novel perceives unmediated contact as a risk of disobedience and formative distortion. In this manner, the narrator disciplines Wilhelm’s perspective and demands narrative obedience from the reader. In addition to identifying one of the roles of obedience in the novel, the study suggests that the control of the perceptive and ideological perspective is a key element that binds different Bildungsromane, thus contributing to the definition of this often elusive genre.”
Read the full article (in Spanish) here.
