Peer-reviewed
Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: Paternity and Bildung in Goethe's "Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre"
This article investigates the nexus between gender and paternity around 1800. It shows that the emerging emphasis on the normative authority of the body, crystallized most poignantly in the concept of Geschlechtscharakter, gave rise to new and acute anxieties relating to fatherhood. In the wake of the French Revolution, paternity operated in a void: it could no longer rely on transcendental truth claims to legitimize social systems of order, and it could not yet take recourse to today's scientific methods. This crisis of paternity found expression in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. My analysis demonstrates that Goethe's novel first depicts ambiguities of patrilineal descent and then resolves them by taking recourse to homosocial bonding
Article, 2004
The German Quarterly, 77, 20040701, 257
2004