In this text, the authoress considers Hermann Hesse's 'The Glass Bead Game' in the perspective of crisis of reference. First, she tries to mark some basic oppositions that organize the novel (individualism-collectivism, concrete-abstraction, history-ahistorical), in which the Kastalian structure establishes itself and overpasses it's principles at once. Second, she presents the Kastalian history as the realization of bricolage, which in the protagonist's opinion is a kind of degenerated thought liberating itself from the concept of truth and disrupting the connection of signifiant and signifié. As a response there appears an attempt to find the lost meaning in the relation to the individual experience.
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