The Tragic Idealism of Double Consciousness: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk and Friedrich Schiller’s Naive and Sentimental Poetry

Abstract

This essay attends to resonances between W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Friedrich Schiller’s Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (1795). First, it shows that the structure of Du Bois’s influential concept of double consciousness shares important structural similarities with Schiller’s dichotomy of the naive and sentimental. These parallels then help reveal an organizing principle of The Souls of Black Folk: the volume has a rainbow architecture, with seven arcs of correspondence between its fourteen essays. The symmetric structure of Du Bois’s book offers a taxonomy of Schiller’s unusual generic categories, which in turn provide a commentary on the tragical logic of idealism in American race relations. (EW)