„Verzogene Namen“. I nomi nel Wilhelm Meister di Goethe

The essay makes the proposal to consider Goethe’s supposed novel of formation Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship a poetic anthropology of human symbolization and the ensemble of its characters, therefore, a typology of human simbolization, created by an application of his fundamental concept of the symbolic (das Symbolische) on the behavior of man. It is Goethe’s particular usage of names, to suggest and support this kind of reading, the particularly interrelated way of their functioning as a nomenclature and, above all, their major and general characteristic of being – as suggests an episode in the book – all irregular, deformed, distorted: «verzogen».