Introduction to Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Bernhard Arnold Kruse

doi:10.6093/978-88-6887-190-1

Introduction to Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Authors

Bernhard Arnold Kruse

University of Naples Federico II

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7048-0033

DOI: https://doi.org/10.6093/978-88-6887-190-1

Keywords:

Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, Literature and modern society, Ancient India and modern literature, German literature, Literature of the 20th century

Synopsis

Publisher: FedOA - Federico II University Press

Series: School of Human and Social Sciences. Working Papers

Pages: 198

Language: italian

NBN: http://nbn.depositolegale.it/urn:nbn:it:unina-29525

Abstract: Siddhartha, the novel by Hermann Hesse from 1922, has gained worldwide popularity. Set in India during the 5th century BC, this story of a boy who questions his father's house and the tradition in which he was raised, and who seeks his own path amidst complete upheavals of self-conception and the world, finds its relevance in the models of subjectivity it presents for a reading between empathy and distance. The construction of new identities based on interiority aims to strengthen individuals who face the loss of identity in modern industrialized societies driven by economic rationality, where they experience alienation and isolation even in digital social interactions. Siddhartha's sincere and profound search for self leads him to experience different aspects of subjectivity, which, in addition to the characters and events narrated, instil confidence in oneself and the ability to face the future through its aesthetic structure. The analysis and interpretation of the text, through a process of close reading, is designed to introduce readers to this dimension of the text, catering not only to beginners studying German literature.

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Author Biography

Bernhard Arnold Kruse, University of Naples Federico II

Bernhard Arnold Kruse is a professor of German literature at the Department of Humanities at the University ‘Federico II’ of Naples. His studies explore the dimension of subjectivity in literature, starting from its aesthetic configuration around 1900, from the Apollonian and Dionysian as Modern Melancholy and Unio Mystica Socialis in the works of the young Nietzsche to the aesthetic religiosity of Rainer Maria Rilke's ‘The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge’. Following the history of literature backwards, from H. Heine to Fr. Schiller, and forward to the present, from Th. Bernhard to J. Zoderer, the elaboration of the aesthetic peculiarity of literature is interwined with its historical and social dimension, addressing the territorial ties of literature, the concept of Heimat, the relationship between literature and nationalism as in H. Burte, or the relationship between history and literature, as in the later dramas of Fr. Schiller, as well as its contrast with multiculturalism, as exemplified in the works of J. Zoderer.