Goethe as chorographer: Time and world in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre

This essay argues that an unacknowledged, yet powerful relation exists between Goethe’s return to an ambulatory and digressive prose in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and the tradition of chorography. Against the split Hans Blumenberg identified between world-time and life-time and its problematic narrative negotiation in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre , I reconstruct the tradition of ancient and early modern cosmography and especially its narrative part, chorography. Initially a kind of narrative Wunderkammer in which an ambulatory narrator explores and recounts the wonders of distant lands, in the age of colonization chorography focused on transmitting those characteristics of landscapes and peoples that disembodied geographical description could not convey. Goethe was familiar with chorographic texts and modes of writing, and several specific chorographic procedures and allusions appear in Wanderjahre . They combine to resist the narrative pull both of his own earlier subjectivism, of Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos , and of the coming industrial novel.