Bildungsroman

12 Key excerpts on "Bildungsroman"

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  Career Stories

  Belle Époque Novels of Professional Development

  • Juliette M. Rogers(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Penn State University Press

    (Publisher)

  The main focus of the term corresponds to the German word Bildung which translates as “formation,” “education,” or “cultivation.” Later uses of the term have removed it from its historical ori- gins and give it the more general definition that critics still attach to it today. For example, German critics Jacobs and Krause define the Bildungsroman as “the intellectual and social development of a central figure who, after going out into the world and experiencing both defeats and triumphs, comes to a better understanding of self and to a generally affirmative view of the world” ( Jacobs and Krause 20, quoted in Hardin xiii). Their more general definition eliminates much of the historic specificity of the original bildung- sroman, but even the last condition in the definition, that there be a “gener- ally affirmative view of the world,” is too specific when we are discussing late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century forms of this genre. Jeffrey Sammons, for example, claims that we cannot expect the Bildungsroman to contain an individual’s reconciliation with society: “It does not matter whether the process of Bildung succeeds or fails, whether the protagonist achieves an accommodation with life and society or not. . . . There must be a sense of evolutionary change within the self, a teleology of individuality, even if the novel, as many do, comes to doubt or deny the possibility of 46  career stories achieving a gratifying result” (Sammons 41). In both the male and female versions of the turn-of-the-century texts to be studied here, the authors rarely give a positive conclusion and often leave the novel with an ambigu- ous final word about French society and the protagonist’s place in it. Authors also strayed from the traditional ideological limits of the Bildungsroman by moving beyond the bourgeois hero, to include work- ing-class protagonists who did not fit the original type.

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  A History of the Bildungsroman

  • Sarah Graham(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The German Bildungsroman can be used to explore many themes – individual psycho- logical development, changing gender roles, the value of labour in a capitalist society, the importance of religion in a secular age – but my focus in this chapter will be primarily on the ways in which several prominent authors reflect in their works on the question of German national identity, broadly construed. Far from being the genre best suited to a ‘nonpolitical’ nation of poets and thinkers (Dichter und Denker), I will argue that the German Bildungsroman is an intrinsically political genre 10 that explores in various ways the relation between the cultural nation (Kulturnation) and the political state. As a genre devoted to the depiction of individual maturation, the Bildungsroman would seem at first glance to have an almost unlimited range: everyone grows up and learns to fit more or less successfully into a given society. Two factors delimit the genre to a considerably narrower focus from the outset, however: first, as the name of the genre indicates, the Bildungsroman is a ‘Roman’, a vernacular prose novel of the sort that arose in early modern Europe and became widely popular only in the course of the eighteenth century. Second, the personal development of the indivi- dual takes place against the backdrop of a world that is changing as well. As Mikhail Bakhtin puts it, the ‘human emergence’ of the protagonist in a modern Bildungsroman ‘is inseparably linked to historical emergence . . . He emerges along with the world and he reflects the historical emergence of the world itself.’ 2 The fate of a Baroque hero may rise and fall, but the wheel of fortune remains in place as it turns; the modern hero, in contrast, matures in a world engaged in an open-ended process of development. Thus, Franco Moretti concludes that the modern Bildungsroman should be viewed as ‘the “symbolic form” of modernity’.

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  The Institution of English Literature

  Formation and Mediation

  • Barbara Schaff, Johannes Schlegel, Carola Surkamp, Barbara Schaff, Johannes Schlegel, Carola Surkamp(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • V&R Unipress

    (Publisher)

  3 Other critics understand Bildung as roughly coterminous with self-cultivation or self-formation; they tend to extend the term Bildungsroman far beyond the boundaries of German literature 4 and use it as a heuristic device that allows them to examine aesthetic mediations of self-realisation as well as of the variable social conditions that enable and constrain it. The positions are symptomatic of two different stages of the development of the literary field: the understanding of the Bildungsroman as a characteristically German genre gradually gains as- cendancy during the time of the emergence of German Literature as a field of academic study and the formation of its canon during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the other hand, the extension of this concept to texts pertaining to other literatures becomes more prevalent during the second half of the twentieth century ; during this period, the literary field is shaped by the influx of students and critics from social groups that had been traditionally 2 Thus, Kurt May vainly tries to discover Bildung in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and asks whether it can really be considered a Bildungsroman. 3 Cf. for instance Berger; Jacobs; Mann; Witte, among others. 4 Cf. for instance Butcher ; Fraiman; Labovitz; Morgan; Stein, among others. Georgia Christinidis 296 © 2017, V&R unipress GmbH, Göttingen ISBN Print: 9783847106296 – ISBN E-Book: 9783847006299 excluded and by challenges to the canon that accompanied this institutional transformation.

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  Apprenticeships

  The Bildungsroman from Goethe to Santayana

  • T. Jeffers(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The term Bildungsroman itself was first coined by Karl Morgenstern in lectures in the early 1820s, with specific reference to Wilhelm Meister: “it portrays the Bildung of the hero in its beginnings and growth to a certain stage of completeness; . . . further[ing] the reader’s Bildung to a much greater extent than any other kind of novel.” 34 The term didn’t gain currency, however, till Wilhelm Dilthey used it in Das Erlebnes und die Dichtung (Poetry and Experience) in 1913: the Bildungsroman examines a “legitimate course” of an individual’s development, each stage having its own specific value and serving as “the ground for a higher stage,” an upward and onward vision of human growth nowhere “more brightly and confidently expressed than in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.” 35 That novel projects the normative pattern that, optimistically, parents, teachers, and adolescents themselves like to contemplate: life is a tussle, no question, and Goethe isn’t shy about pointing this out, but children become youths and youths become happily initiated grown-ups, ready to invest their talents in Liebe und Arbeit, the love and work of the civil society they belong to. Which presumably is why Dilthey designated the novel’s plot as “legitimate,” and why Morgenstern had been able to recommend it to younger readers, who might themselves be seeking models for, or reassurance about, their own movement toward adulthood. Susanne Howe’s foundational study, Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen (1930), in effect takes over Dilthey’s idea of the type: The adolescent hero of the typical “apprentice” novel sets out on his way through the world, meets with reverses usually due to his own temperament, falls in with various guides and counsellors, makes many false starts in choosing his friends, his wife, and his life work, and finally adjusts himself in some way to the demands of his time and envi- ronment by finding a sphere of action in which he may work effectively .

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  Literature after Postmodernism

  Reconstructive Fantasies

  • I. Huber(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Narrow definitions of the genre developed in German studies insist on restricting it to the very specific context of eighteenth-century Germany, in which the classical idea of Bildung as ‘a harmonious and unified inner culture formed through social freedom and a secular aesthetic education’ took root (Castle 33; cf. Boes 230–3; Swales 14). Nonetheless, the genre has variously seen application within a wider European context (cf. Beddow; Castle; Moretti). Indeed, the Bildungsroman has widely come to figure as the emblematic literary expression of Enlightenment, which, true to Immanuel Kant’s definition of Enlightenment as ‘man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,’ has cast historical development itself as a narrative of formation, imagining it as ‘humanity’s passage to its adult status’ (Foucault 38). Consequently, modernist and postmodernist critiques of the project of Enlightenment also had repercussions on that narrative genre which seemed to owe so many of its basic assumptions to Enlightenment discourses. Contested as the genre and its definition are, Tobias Boes consequently notes a certain critical consensus to ‘regard the novel of formation as a nineteenth-century phenomenon’ (230–1). Although there are some canonical modernist exemplars of the genre, these are often perceived as limit-cases which ultimately attest to the increasing unviability of the typical Bildungsroman trajectory. As Boes summarises a typical critical position: ‘the modernists’ obsession with synchronic models of human experience (epiphany, vortex, shock) and with small-scale diachrony (the stream of consciousness) are often blamed for the demise of a form that by its very definition requires narrative attention to minute and long-term changes’ (231). 2 But the genre became increasingly problematic for more than just aesthetic reasons

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  Forming Humanity

  Redeeming the German Bildung Tradition

  • Jennifer A. Herdt(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  Precisely in so doing, the Bildungsroman was seen by its first theorists as furthering “the development [ Bildung ] of the reader to a greater extent than any other form of novel.” 5 So Bildung was understood as taking place both within the fictional narrative—in the protagonist—and in reality, in the reader. What was at stake here was the possibility of a nondidactic art that nevertheless served individual projects of ethical formation precisely by way of the creative imagination. More generally at issue was the very identity of art, of ethics, and the relation between them, and implicit in this nexus was also the question whether and in what sense the Bildungsroman could take on something like the formative role played by scripture itself within Pietist communities. In order to see how these issues played out we must attend to some of the key social changes associated with the emergence of the novel in the eighteenth century and with the impact of these changes both on the cultural place of scripture and other religious texts and on ethical formation. After examining the conditions for the rise of the novel generally speaking, and the special characteristics that set novels apart from previous literary forms, I will turn to the Bildungsroman in particular. The claim that novels have an important part to play in ethical formation is familiar to us today from contemporary philosophical and theological retrievals of virtue ethics. Fine-grained perception of particulars is essential, and narrative fiction excels in the depiction of such particulars; moral principles do not apply themselves. Moreover, narrative fiction cultivates our capacity for empathy with others, expanding our capacity to care. 6 It was in the mid-eighteenth century that a keen sense of the chasm between universal moral principle and the particularities of lived experience developed, along with the sense that art, and the novel in particular, could assist in navigating this divide

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  Human Forms

  The Novel in the Age of Evolution

  • Ian Duncan(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  Bildung, kept open its horizon of universal potentiality.

  Accordingly, in a taxonomic scandal that has exercised recent criticism, the Bildungsroman seems less to be a clear-cut, stable genre, categorically commensurate with other genres (such as the historical novel), than a principle that pervades the modern novel as such—its “conceptual horizon,” its life force or formative drive.87 Robert Musil identified the Bildungsroman with “the organic plasticity of man”: “In this sense,” he maintained, “every novel worthy of the name is a Bildungsroman.”88 Several commentators emphasize the reverse of this claim: everywhere in novelistic discourse, hence nowhere in particular, the Bildungsroman is a “phantom formation” conjured up by critics.89 In this, again, it models its putative end or product, “humanity,” that horizon of Bildung asymptotic with any actual human life. Schlegel discloses the division, constitutive of the Romantic novel, between a poetic energy or formative drive and a particular form or genre, materialized in a national history that will always fall short of its potential. And he helps us see that division as an anthropological predicament as well as a rhetorical one. Irony is not only the distinctive character or condition of the literary utterance: it is also the condition of being human. Schlegel summarizes the case in an early fragment (parsing Fichte): “humanity is not wholly present in the individual, but there only in part. The human being can never be present.”90 Schlegel, however, construes this human predicament of self-displacement as generative rather than disabling. The force of Schlegelian irony is “expansive and connective, not simply disruptive and corrosive,” since, “though the subject may always be less than it is, it is also more”91 —just as the novel is, or should be, “more than the novel.”92

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  Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman

  • Ellen McWilliams(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Perhaps most noticeable is the centrality of ethnicity to the female Bildungsroman, particularly in North American literature. It would seem that in spite of the ideological limitations foregrounded by many critics, the Bildungsroman is destined to remain a medium of expression for new generations of emerging voices, whether in relation to gender and sexuality or to ethnicity and race. Its movement outward in increasing concentric circles from its German origins has made it a truly supranational genre. This book will argue that Atwood’s differences from this recent groundswell in the female genre are as important as her similarities, and yet a brief description of this phenomenon will serve to place Atwood in the context of the genre revitalized far in time and place from its origins.

  Common to all studies of the multicultural Bildungsroman, whether in the context of Commonwealth, African-Caribbean, Asian, or African-American literatures, is the recognition that, although the Bildungsroman is “a literary form that has outlived its usefulness and become virtually defunct in the European context”, it has assumed “a new and viable identity overseas” (Butcher 261). This is something that is at the centre of Martin Japtok’s comparative reading of the genre in Growing Up Ethnic: Nationalism and the Bildungsroman in African American and Jewish American Fiction (2005), in which he emphasizes the communal dimension of the genre in its new contexts: “What may be called the ethnic Bildungsroman consists, then, of a development away from the more exclusively personality-oriented plot of the traditional Bildungsroman and towards a more political and social vision” (27). Bonnie Hoover Braendlin takes up this theme in her article “Bildung in Ethnic Women Writers”, as does Geta LeSeur in her study Ten is the Age of Darkness: The Black Bildungsroman

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  The Cambridge History of the English Novel

  • Robert L. Caserio, Clement Hawes(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  25 The Bildungsroman brigid lowe The Bildungsroman, or novel of self-development, is often said to have origi- nated in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1795), and to have crossed the Channel in Thomas Carlyle’s famous 1824 translation. However, it is tempting to include in a history of the English Bildungsroman earlier literary landmarks such as Robinson Crusoe (1719), Clarissa (1748), Tom Jones (1749), Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), the novels of Fanny Burney and a number of those of Scott and Austen. Indeed, the fact that most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English novels are deeply concerned with self-development suggests that the term Bildungsroman should be considered as describing a central tendency of the English novel sui generis. Carlyle’s translation of Wilhelm Meister coincided with intensified focus on inward psychological development, as opposed to outward adventures and progress, and the nineteenth-century heyday of the Bildungsroman in English saw significant formal developments tailored to the intensification. The very unlikeness of Wilhelm Meister to any English Bildungsroman that precedes or follows it points toward the particularities of the English species. 1 Wilhelm’s story, like that of the heroes of Scott’s Rob Roy (1818) or Thackeray’s Pendennis (1848–1850), begins with his struggle to escape a humdrum bourgeois future in favor of a romantic alternative. But Wilhelm inherits a large fortune, and thereby comes to inhabit a social dimension in which rules of conduct are extremely flexible. In contrast English heroes typically find their desires and choices radically constrained by economic realities and socio- moral codes. The economic, moral, and social constraints, or the lack of them, have great formal implications. In English Bildungsromane rigid nineteenth- century rules of sexual conduct also are great plot drivers.

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  The Bloomsbury Handbook to Ageing in Contemporary Literature and Film

  • Sarah Falcus, Heike Hartung, Raquel Medina, Sarah Falcus, Heike Hartung, Raquel Medina(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Female characters in these novels typically serve as symbolic representations of the protagonist’s stages of development, culminating in the hero’s harmonious marriage with an idealized woman. The genre’s definition was later broadened to encompass European novels of formation with more realistic settings and plots, including coming-of-age novels by, for instance, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, and George Eliot, about young women whose ‘apprenticeship’ and character formation are confined to domestic settings and the process of courtship (Hirsch 1979 : 308). Their maturation often takes place ‘internally rather than “on the road” ’ (Waxman 1985 : 319). Despite critical tendencies to read these novels as a social critique of women’s limited opportunities (Hartung 2019 : 2), they have also been criticized as showing female characters who ‘grow down’ (Pratt qtd in Waxman 1985 : 319) rather than up. As Heike Hartung claims, ‘These developments within feminist literary history provide the background for reconceptualizations of the Bildungsroman from the perspective of age studies’ (2019 : 2). The cultural narrative of ageing is often presented as a linear ‘decline narrative’ (Gullette 1997); it tends to be marked by one-sided negative stereotypes emphasizing physical and cognitive deterioration, and ultimately marginalizes older people by rendering them socially invisible. In contrast, contemporary versions of the Bildungsroman portray the variety, richness, and complexity of the subjective experience of ageing, ‘extending the notion of individual development to all stages of the life course’ (Hartung 2019 : 3) and focusing on ‘maturity rather than youthfulness as a value’ (2019 : 4)

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  Gender and the Self in Latin American Literature

  • Emma Staniland(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  17. Kontje, Private Lives , p. 12.

  18. Smith, ‘Cultivating Gender’, p. 216.

  19. Thomas L. Jeffers, Apprenticeships: The Bildungsroman from Goethe to Santayana (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 24.

  20. Moretti, The Way of the World , p. viii.

  21. Gyorgy Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historic-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature (London: Merlin Press, 1971), p. 132.

  22. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel , p. 133.

  23. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel , p. 134.

  24. Jeffers, Apprenticeships , p. 13.

  25. Jeffers, Apprenticeships , p. 34.

  26. Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel)’, in V. W. McGee (trans.), Carol Emerson and Michael Holquist (eds.), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 10.

  27. Bakhtin, ‘The Bildungsroman ’, pp. 20–21.

  28. Bakhtin, ‘The Bildungsroman ’, p. 21.

  29. Bakhtin, ‘The Bildungsroman ’, p. 23.

  30. Moretti, The Way of the World , p. 233.

  31. Moretti, The Way of the World , p. 16.

  32. Joanne S. Frye, Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experience (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986), p. 79.

  33. Paul McAleer, ‘Transexual Identities in a Transcultural Context: Jaime Bayly’s La noche es virgen and the Comic Bildungsroman ’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies , 15.2/3 (August/December 2009), 179–198, p. 179.

  34. Moretti, The Way of the World , pp. ix–x.

  35. Stella Bolaki, Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Ethnic American Women’s Fiction (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2011), pp. 10–11.

  36. Carol Lazzaro-Weis, ‘The Female “Bildungsroman”: Calling It into Question’, NWSA Journal , 2.1 (Winter 1990), 16–34, p. 17.

  37. Abel et al., The Voyage In , pp. 13–14.

  38. Abel et al., The Voyage In , p. 5.

  39.

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  The Impact of Education

  on Character Formation, Ethics, and the Communication of Values in Late Modern Pluralistic Societies

  • John Witte, Michael Welker, Stephen Pickard, John Witte, Michael Welker, Stephen Pickard(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Evangelische Verlagsanstalt

    (Publisher)

  Yes, it is commonly accepted that literature education should be considered in the frame of personal development, of Bildung in its strong sense, and yes, this process of maturation is seen as a complex interaction of individualization, social- ization, and enculturation. But when it comes to more focused questions about aims or practices in literature education, the normative issue of personal devel- opment brought about via encounters with literature may become a rather vague and distant construct, perhaps even losing its potential to orient professionals in the educational process. My assumption is that this is at least partly due to the fluidity that characterizes the concepts of “person,” “self,” “subject,” “literature”— and, of course, Bildung. This openness may help in fostering and accepting diver- sity in our social and cultural environments. At the same time, however, it creates a demand to (re‐)consider how a person may develop in the educational process and how the potential of literature as a source and mediator of this process may be grasped. Given my disciplinary background in languages and literature, my observa- tions will focus on literature in education and develop the notion of character for- mation from there, taking up the current discourse on subjectivation in German educational research. Subjectivation is considered as a relational process in a so- ciocultural environment. Education plays an important role in this process. In sit- uations of teaching and learning, positions are assigned to the various actors, and the way human beings address each other contributes to subjectivation. 1 This nonessentialist approach fits theories of cognitive development in the line of Lev Vygotskij which hold that co-construction is constitutive for all learning. 2 Such processes also shape or even determine encounters with literature, particularly with learners.

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