Journey as a Philosophical Topos in Early Romantic Literary Narratives. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Jenaers

The motif of the journey is one of the most widespread and enduring themes in Western literature. It is also a universal and timeless philosophical topos that thinkers from various traditions and backgrounds have used since antiquity. This figure plays a special role in the works of the French and G...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Malwina Rolka
Format: Article
Language:deu
Published: Institute Nova Revija for the Humanities 2025-07-01
Series:Phainomena
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.phainomena.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/14_E-PHI_132-133_Rolka.pdf
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Summary:The motif of the journey is one of the most widespread and enduring themes in Western literature. It is also a universal and timeless philosophical topos that thinkers from various traditions and backgrounds have used since antiquity. This figure plays a special role in the works of the French and German Romantic pioneers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Jenaers (Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Hölderlin) who imbue literary narratives about journey with philosophical meaning. My aim is to reveal the shared conceptual foundation of these narratives and demonstrate significant connections between various manifestations of early Romantic thought in the French and German traditions. In the sections of the article, I explore the early Romantic literary figure of journey as the narrative basis for: the philosophical concept of education, the category of cognition/self-cognition in an anthropological context, and the first attempts to develop a modern model of historiosophy.
ISSN:1318-3362
2232-6650