Open Secrets Literature, Education, and Authority from J-J. Rousseau to J. M. Coetzee

Open Secrets reflects on contemporary humanistic pedagogy by examining thelimits of the teachable in this domain. The Goethean motif of the open secretrefers not to a revealed mystery but to an utterance that is not understood, thelikely fate of any instruction based purely on authority. Revisiting theEuropean Bildungsroman, it studies the pedagogical relationship from the pointof view of the tutor or mentor figure rather than with the usual focus on theyoung hero. The argument is not confined to works of fiction, however, butexamines texts in which the category of fiction has a crucial and constitutivefunction, for a growing awareness of limited authority on the part of the mentorfigures is closely related to fictive self-consciousness in the texts.Rousseau's Emile, as a semi-novelised treatise, whose fictiveness is at onceovert and yet unmarked, is relatively unaware of the imaginary nature of itsenvisaged authority. Passing through Laurence Sterne, C. M. Wieland, Goethe andNietzsche, the situation is gradually reversed, culminating with the consciousimpasse of authority in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. All these writers have achievedtheir pedagogical impact despite, indeed by means of, their internal scepticism.By contrast, in the three subsequent writers, D. H. Lawrence, F. R. Leavis andJ. M. Coetzee, the impasse of pedagogical authority becomes more literal as theauthority of Bildung is eroded in the wider culture. The awareness ofpedagogical authority as a species of fiction, to be conducted in an aestheticspirit, remains a significant prophylactic against the perennial pressure ofreductive conceptions of the education as form of instructional'production'.

Michael Bell is from London, England, and took his undergraduate and doctoral degrees in English at University College, London. He taught in France, Germany, Canada and the USA before coming to the University of Warwick in 1973. Currently Director of the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature, he has taken an active part in the University's various comparative and interdisciplinary programmes.