Open Secrets

Open Secrets reflects on contemporary humanistic pedagogy by examining the limits of the teachable in this domain. The Goethean motif of the open secret refers not to a revealed mystery but to an utterance that is not understood the likely fate of any instruction based purely on authority. Revisiting the European Bildungsroman it studies the pedagogical relationship from the point of view of the tutor or mentor figure rather than with the usual focus on the young hero. The argument is not confined to works of fiction however but examines texts in which the category of fiction has a crucial and constitutive function for a growing awareness of limited authority on the part of the mentor figures is closely related to fictive self-consciousness in the texts. Rousseau''s Emile as a semi-novelised treatise whose fictiveness is at once overt and yet unmarked is relatively unaware of the imaginary nature of its envisaged authority. Passing through Laurence Sterne C. M. Wieland Goethe and Nietzsche the situation is gradually reversed culminating with the conscious impasse of authority in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. All these writers have achieved their pedagogical impact despite indeed by means of their internal scepticism. By contrast in the three subsequent writers D. H. Lawrence F. R. Leavis and J. M. Coetzee the impasse of pedagogical authority becomes more literal as the authority of Bildung is eroded in the wider culture. The awareness of pedagogical authority as a species of fiction to be conducted in an aesthetic spirit remains a significant prophylactic against the perennial pressure of reductive conceptions of the education as form of instructional ''production''.