Werther and Wilhem Meister: the conflict between individual and society in two novels of Goethe
Keywords:
Novel, Self-cultivation, Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship,Abstract
This article aims to draw a comparison between the two first novels of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The sorrows of young Werther and Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, in the interest to see the way in which these two novels interpreted fundamental questions of the arising modernity, especially with the political rise of the bourgeoisie. These questions are related with the conflicts between individual and society, to thebarriersimposed by the social reality against the aspirations of the personality. Both novels are revealing, at the same time, of Goethe’s biographical trajectory and the historical conflicts he faced. It is possible to espy between the first and the second novel an apprenticeship that reveals the hard process of personal self-cultivation in the shock against the social reality.