A Printed Proteus

This essay concerns itself primarily with the fifth book and the Continuatio to Grimmelshausen's Der Abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch in order to demonstrate that the protagonist‐narrator's quest for self‐discovery is ineluctably subverted by the very nature of text. Reading the work as a trauma narrative, the article explores Simplicius's relation to writing in an era when the phenomenon of print is still a novelty—ultimately revealing text itself as antithetical to the notion of Bildung too often associated with the protagonist's apparent growth. This article contends that Simplicius never achieves a sturdy sense of self through his written project and that this failure is due to the unstable identity of text (in part the hesitation between orality, manuscript and printed type) during the Baroque

Aesthetics · Art · Baroque · Epistemology · Identity (music) · Linguistics · Literacy · Literature · Narrative · Novelty · Orality · Order (exchange) · Phenomenon · Reading (process) · Relation (database) · Sociology · Theology · Computer Science · German Literature and Culture Studies · Media, Communication, and Education · Philosophy · Visual Culture and Art Theory

• Orality and Literacy

  Walter J Ong•Oralität und Literalität•1982

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• Unclaimed Experience

  Cathy Caruth•Unclaimed experience•1996

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• Emblematic Structures in Simplicissimus Teutsch

  John Heckman•Modern Language Notes•1969

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