Abstract

This is a study of Goethe's essays and the genre of the essay. The essay challenges the treatise--systematic, teleologically oriented discourse that has its foundation in the attempt to adduce origins and produce final signifieds. As such, systematic discourse exhibits an extreme monologic tendency, whereas essayistic discourse depends on and enacts the dialogic. ;The study begins by considering the problem of beginnings and the divergence of essayistic from archeo-teleological discourse. The two parts then concentrate on the opposition between the essay and systematic discourse, and the textual dialogism of the essay. Part One performs a detailed reading of what seems to be one of Goethe's most systematic texts: Der Sammler und die Seinigen. The text's subversive treatment of the system it 'presents' renders it a deconstructive text and thus a questioning of the possibility of systematic discourse. In its subversion of closure it also raises the general question of genre, which relies on boundaries for its very existence. Goethe's essayistic discourse, by breaking the law of genre, constitutes a 'genre of genre'. ;Part Two reinscribes the subversion of the system as that of the law of the text and as the play of differance. The undermining of the text's authority effects and is reflected in the dis-integration of the authoritative voice of an individual author. In such Propylaen essays as "Uber Wahrheit und Wahrscheinlichkeit der Kunstwerke," "Uber Laokoon," Diderots Versuch uber die Malerei, and Der Sammler und die Seinigen, the text becomes a multiplicity of 'voices'--an intertextual dialogue rather than an autonomous, monologic work. The community of texts within a 'particular' text and the subversion of the authoritative voice together formulate Goethe's notion of community itself. ;This is the first extended study of Goethe's essays as essays, that is, in a specifically generic context that accounts for rhetorical and discursive strategies. Goethe's essayistic discourse and the insights it provides into his other writings place him, along with Lessing and Herder, in an unexpected and radically different theoretical landscape--in the range of the post-modern