Pedagogical Eros in Modernity: An Investigation of the Relationship Between Jakob and Herr Benjamenta in Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten: Ein Tagebuch
Public Deposited- Last Modified
- June 18, 2020
- Creator
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Finch, John Forrest
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures
- Abstract
- This thesis argues that in Robert Walser’s novel Jakob von Gunten: Ein Tagebuch (1909) a relationship of pedagogical Eros, or pederasty as redefined by the early 20th Century pedagogue Gustav Wyneken, arises between the protagonist, Jakob von Gunten, and the principal of his school, Herr Benjamenta. Ultimately, this literary project claims that Robert Walser’s novel Jakob von Gunten suggests that for people living in urban environments in modernity, capitaloriented norms and commercial lifestyle marginalize natural human behaviors – namely real boredom – and thereby inhibit and diminish their natural ability to form certain intimate interpersonal relationships. More simply put, this project will first make observations about life in the 20th Century, analyze them in terms of how they make certain types of relationships’ existence hard to come by, and then apply these analyses to the relationship between the characters Herr Benjamenta and Jakob von Gunten. This work then explores the dynamic between Herr Benjamenta and Jakob and investigates whether or not its existence in modern times is feasible. Because of the new standard of aesthetic experience in industrial capitalist society, which directly influences the norms of pedagogical experiences, this investigation then posits that Herr Benjamenta and Jakob von Gunten begin to experience Gustav Wyneken’s pre-modern concept of pedagogical Eros with one another, but that it is marginalized to such an extent by modern norms that its existence is ultimately not tolerated. As Walter Benjamin examined how the normalization of a daily onslaught of media in industrial capitalist society degrades man’s ability to form authentic relationships with works of art, this project applies this theory to the relationship between Jakob and Herr Benjamenta in Jakob von Gunten to demonstrate that homo-social intergenerational pedagogical relationships are marginalized because of everyday modern social norms. Just as the social conditions of an industrially productive society marginalize authentic aesthetic experiences, so too are uniquely intimate intergenerational educational relationships marginalized by these conditions insofar that they no longer are permitted to exist in the 20th Century because they are contrary to modern thought. While authentic aesthetic experiences, especially experiences of real boredom, were hard to come by in the early 20th Century, this work argues that the Institute Benjamenta creates a special space in which a pedagogy of idleness and ritualistic, almost occult, activities are performed in an ever increasingly rushed, mechanized, and artificialized world.
- Date of publication
- spring 2015
- Keyword
- DOI
- Resource type
- Rights statement
- In Copyright
- Note
- Funding: Dunlevie Honors Undergraduate Research Fund
- Advisor
- Layne-Kopf, Priscilla
- Degree
- Bachelor of Arts
- Honors level
- Highest Honors
- Degree granting institution
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Graduation year
- 2015
- Language
- English
- Extent
- 85
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