An Allegory of Bildung.

This article proposes an interpretation of Friedrich Schlegel's critical essay ‘Über Goethes Meister’ (1798). Conspicuously subjecting Goethe's classical Bildungsroman to what we may term a ‘deconstructive’ reading ante terminem, Schlegel's famous review may be interpreted as an underplayed Romantic refutation of Goethe's Classicist aesthetics. Advancing a daring allegorical interpretation of the novel's central concept of Bildung– not just referring to ‘formation’ in the delimited social and educational sense, but also to ‘formation’ as the infinite principle of aesthetic creation, the inexhaustible source of art – Schlegel claims the literary text's deviation from the author's official aesthetic programme, the organic aesthetics of the symbol, and provocatively inserts it into a transcendental allegorical aesthetics. He thereby ultimately turns Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, the emblem of the secular bourgeois novel, into a paradigm of the Romantic work of art as progressive Universalpoesie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]