The individual artist plays the role of a kind of "damaged" vessel into which subjectivity flees in its attempt to escape the reifying effects of bou… - Richard T. Gray

The narrative that emerges in the interpretations developed here presents a critical counter-narrative to the ideological self-understanding of the bourgeois subject as autonomous, rational, self-perfectible in-dividual. The account tells the (his)tory of the subject's often violent political self-disciplining, a self-coercion whose disciplinary methods vary from the extreme of brutal self-repression to the more moderate mode of cautious political self-restraint. The history of the bourgeois subject in Germany appears as the story of a massive repression of certain insights on the part of middle-class intellectuals into the pernicious political and cultural implications of bourgeois socioeconomic praxis.

"Literature" names a discourse in which semiotic elements constantly disrupt the institutional codifications of the symbolic order.