Coltivare un congelamento. Il giardino stifteriano nel caso di Nachsommer

The contribution proceeds from the hypothesis that the claim to exemplarity in the Bildungsroman undermines its own coherence, and uses Adalbert Stifter’s Nachsommer (1857) as an embodiment of the instant when the genre turns against its own structural principles. The formative stages retraced by Heinrich Drendorf appear as false movements, stripped of their effectiveness and designed to stifle critical thinking as soon as it emerges. This mechanism finds its territorialisation in the Rosenhaus, where, in the name of the sanfte Gesetz, the rural idyll serves as a technical-disciplinary instrument of proactive expulsion, with any surplus capable of engendering conflict being eradicated.