«Verzogene namen». I nomi nel Wilhelm Meister di Goethe

Abstract

The paper presents Goethe’s supposed novel of formation Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship as a poetic anthropology of human symbolization and the ensemble of its characters, therefore, as a typology of human symbolization, created by an application of his fundamental concept of the symbolic (das Symbolische) to human behavior. It is Goethe’s particular usage of names that suggests and justifies this kind of interpretation, the particularly interrelated way of their functioning as a nomenclature, and, above all, their principal characteristic: they are all irregular, deformed, distorted – that is, «verzogen».