COMP 284
The Concept of Bildung: the Literature and Philosophy of Self-Discovery Spring 2014
Division I
This is not the current course catalog

This course traces the influential concept of Bildung, or self-discovery, through the literature and philosophy of Germany, England, France, and other traditions, from the Enlightenment to the present. At the time of the French Revolution and amid the general fervor for democratic self-rule that it represented, a handful of German philosophers asked themselves a simple and yet profound question: If modern individuals could free themselves from dogmatic belief and from the political and cultural institutions that such belief supported, what new aesthetic, social, and political forms could express and support this freedom, and how might these new forms be discovered and maintained? The famously untranslatable concept of Bildung, whose meaning spans notions of education, cultivation, self-discovery, and self-actualization, was a response to this question that would inform joint projects of scientific discovery, artistic self-expression, and political self-determination well beyond the borders of Germany, and to the present day. Through careful analysis of key texts from this tradition, students will explore how representations of Bildung reflect changing ideas about identity, agency, pleasure, knowledge, and power. Readings will include literary works by writers like Goethe, C. Brontë, Wordsworth, Flaubert, Wilde, Equiano, Fanon, and Coetzee, in combination with critical and philosophical texts by figures like Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud.