Bildungsroman

In literary criticism, a Bildungsroman (German pronunciation: [ˈbɪldʊŋs.ʁoˌmaːn], plural Bildungsromane, German pronunciation: [ˈbɪldʊŋs.ʁoˌmaːnə]) is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood (coming of age),[1] in which character change is important.[2][3][4][lower-alpha 1] The term comes from the German words Bildung ("education") and Roman ("novel").

Origin

The term was coined in 1819 by philologist Karl Morgenstern in his university lectures, and was later famously reprised by Wilhelm Dilthey, who legitimized it in 1870 and popularized it in 1905.[5][6] The genre is further characterized by a number of formal, topical, and thematic features.[7] The term coming-of-age novel is sometimes used interchangeably with Bildungsroman, but its use is usually wider and less technical.

The birth of the Bildungsroman is normally dated to the publication of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by Johann Wolfgang Goethe in 1795–96,[8] or, sometimes, to Christoph Martin Wieland's Geschichte des Agathon of 1767.[9] Although the Bildungsroman arose in Germany, it has had extensive influence first in Europe and later throughout the world. Thomas Carlyle translated Goethe's novel into English, and after its publication in 1824, many British authors wrote novels inspired by it.[10][11] In the 20th century, it spread to Germany, Britain,[12] France,[13][14] and several other countries around the globe.[15]

The genre translates fairly directly into the cinematic form, the coming-of-age film.

Plot outline

A Bildungsroman relates the growing up or "coming of age" of a sensitive person who goes in search of answers to life's questions with the expectation that these will result in gaining experience of the world. The genre evolved from folklore tales of a dunce or youngest child going out in the world to seek his fortune.[16] Usually in the beginning of the story there is an emotional loss which makes the protagonist leave on his or her journey. In a Bildungsroman, the goal is maturity, and the protagonist achieves it gradually and with difficulty. The genre often features a main conflict between the main character and society. Typically, the values of society are gradually accepted by the protagonist and he or she is ultimately accepted into society—the protagonist's mistakes and disappointments are over. In some works, the protagonist is able to reach out and help others after having achieved maturity.

Franco Moretti "argues that the main conflict in the Bildungsroman is the myth of modernity with its overvaluation of youth and progress as it clashes with the static teleological vision of happiness and reconciliation found in the endings of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and even Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice".[17]

There are many variations and subgenres of Bildungsroman that focus on the growth of an individual. An Entwicklungsroman ("development novel") is a story of general growth rather than self-cultivation. An Erziehungsroman ("education novel") focuses on training and formal schooling,[18] while a Künstlerroman ("artist novel") is about the development of an artist and shows a growth of the self.[19] Furthermore, some memoirs and published journals can be regarded as Bildungsroman although being predominantly factual (e.g. The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac or The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto "Che" Guevara).[20] The term is also more loosely used to describe coming-of-age films and related works in other genres.

Examples

Precursors

18th century

19th century

20th century

21st century

See also

Notes
  1. Engel explains that the term has in recent years been applied to very different novels but originally meant a novel of formation of a character, of an individual personality on interaction (including conflict) with society. He also points out that it was, like the "novel of education" (Erziehungsroman), a subgenre of the "novel of development" (Entwicklungsroman).[5]
  2. Back of the French translation in the "Folio" collection (éditions Gallimard, 2010): "[...] Avec ce roman d'apprentissage, Philip Roth poursuit son analyse de l'histoire de l'Amérique – celle des années cinquante, des tabous et des frustrations sexuelles – et de son impact sur la vie d'un homme jeune, isolé, vulnérable."

References
  1. Lynch 1999.
  2. Bakhtin 1996, p. 21.
  3. Jeffers 2005, p. 2.
  4. "Bildungsroman: German literary genre". Encyclopædia Britannica. 22 April 2013.
  5. Engel 2008, pp. 263–266.
  6. Summerfield & Downward 2010, p. 1.
  7. Iversen, Annikin Teines (2010). "Change and Continuity; The Bildungsroman in English". University of Tromsø: Munin open research archive. hdl:10037/2486. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  8. Jeffers 2005, p. 49.
  9. Swales, Martin. The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. 38.
  10. Buckley, J. H. (1974), Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, Harvard Univ Press, ISBN 978-0-67479-640-9.
  11. Ellis, L. (1999), Appearing to Diminish: Female Development and the British Bildungsroman, 1750–1850, London: Bucknell University Press, ISBN 978-0-83875-411-5
  12. Stein, M., "The Black British Bildungsroman and the Transformation of Britain: Connectedness across Difference" in Barbara Korte, Klaus Peter Müller, editors (1998), Unity in Diversity Revisited?: British Literature and Culture in the 1990s, pp. 89–105, Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, ISBN 382-3-35192-3.
  13. Moretti, Franco, and Albert Sbragia (1987), The Way of the World: the Bildungsroman in European Culture, London: Verso, ISBN 978-0-86091-159-3.
  14. Marianne Hirsch, "The Novel of Formation as Genre: Between Great Expectations and Lost Illusions" Archived 11 December 2014 at the Wayback Machine, Genre Vol. 12 (Fall 1979), pp. 293–311, University of Oklahoma
  15. Slaughter, J. R. (2006), "Novel Subjects and Enabling Fictions: the Formal Articulation of International Human Rights Law", Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, Ch. 2 (2007), New York: Fordham University Press, ISBN 978-0-82322-817-1; doi:10.5422/fordham/9780823228171.001.0001.
  16. "Franco Moretti et John Neubauer, historiens de la littérature, ont tous deux insisté sur le rôle fondamental qu’a joué le roman, depuis la fin du XVIIIe siècle jusqu’à la Première Guerre mondiale, dans la construction des âges de la vie, de l’adolescence et la jeunesse. Si, avant cette période, les jeunes sont les laissés-pour-compte de la littérature romanesque, cette entrée tardive est compensée par la place centrale qu’ils occupent dans le roman de formation. Vers la fin du XIXe siècle, quand ce genre entre en crise, les jeunes sont remplacés par les adolescents, nouveaux protagonistes des œuvres de fiction. Après les écrits de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, le roman de formation, ou Bildungsroman, dont l’apogée se situe entre Les années d’apprentissage de Wilhelm Meister de Goethe (1795–1796) et l’Éducation sentimentale de Flaubert (1869), invente la figure littéraire du jeune homme voyageur. C’est à partir donc de cette période qu’il faudra retrouver certains traits des voyages fictionnels, que j’appelle matrices , qui hantent encore notre imaginaire, et que l’on retrouve dans les séjours Erasmus contemporains" (Cicchelli Vincenzo, "Les legs du voyage de formation à la Bildung cosmopolite", Le Télémaque, 2010/2 (n° 38), pp. 57–70. DOI: 10.3917/tele.038.0057.
  17. Lazzaro-Weis, Carol, "The Female 'Bildungsroman': Calling It into Question", NWSA Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Winter, 1990), pp. 16–34.
  18. Malone, David H., Faculty Development, or Faculty Life as a "Bildungsroman", Profession (1979), pp. 46–50.
  19. Werlock, James P. (2010). The Facts on File companion to the American short story. 2. p. 387. ISBN 9781438127439.
  20. "The Motorcycle Diaries by Che Guevara–HSC English Discovery Archived 2016-07-14 at the Wayback Machine", Real Teacher Tutors. Retrieved 12 July 2016.
  21. Palmer, Joy; Liora Bresler; David Edward Cooper, eds. (2001). Fifty major thinkers on education: from Confucius to Dewey. Routledge Key Guides. p. 34. ISBN 0-415-23126-4.
  22. "El lazarillo de Tormes" (PDF) (in Spanish). Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte (Spain). 2004. p. 1. Retrieved 24 November 2013.
  23. Hanlon, Aaron (2019). "Fanny Hill and the Legibility of Consent". ELH. 86 (4): 941–966. doi:10.1353/elh.2019.0035.
  24. McCracken, David (2016). "A Burkean Analysis of the Sublimity and the Beauty of the Phallus in John Cleland's Fanny Hill". ANQ. 29 (3): 138–141. doi:10.1080/0895769X.2016.1216388.
  25. McWilliams, Ellen (2009). Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman. Ashgate Publishing. p. 14. ISBN 978-0-7546-6027-9. The two early English Bildungsromane already mentioned, Tom Jones and The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, are examples of coming-of-age narratives that predate the generic expectations of the German tradition.
  26. Feder, Helena (2014). Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture : Biology and the Bildungsroman. Routledge. p. 30. ISBN 9781315578644. Candide exhibits several of the traits of the “traditional” or Germanic Bildungsroman, particularly the depiction of the development of an individual through travel. As a catalogue of the horrors of the modern world, Candide — perhaps more than any of the other texts examined in this book—lives up to Moretti’s articulation of the Bildungsroman as the “‘symbolic form’ of modernity” (5). Read from an ecocultural perspective, this philosophical Bildungsroman suggests the limitations of Dialectic ’s conceptions of the Enlightenment and the subject with a model, albeit a modest one, for interaction with the world outside of rationalism’s logic of domination.
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  30. Stević & Prendergast 2017, p. 433.
  31. Victorian Fiction as a Bildungsroman: Its Flourishing and Complexity. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2019. ISBN 9781527540798.
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  42. Mukherjee, Meenakshi (1985). Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India. Oxford University Press. p. 128. ISBN 0-19-561648-0.
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Bibliography
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  • Bolaki, Stella (2011), Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women's Fiction, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
  • Engel, Manfred (2008), "Variants of the Romantic 'Bildungsroman' (with a Short Note on the 'Artist Novel')", in Gerald Gillespie; Manfred Engel; Bernard Dieterle (eds.), Romantic Prose Fiction, A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, XXIII, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 263–295, ISBN 978-90-272-3456-8.
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Further reading
  • Abrams, M. H. (2005). Glossary of Literary Terms (8th ed.). Boston: Thomson Wadsworth. ISBN 1-4130-0218-8.
  • Madden, David (1980). "Bildungsroman". A Primer of the Novel: For Readers and Writers. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. pp. 18–19. ISBN 978-0810812659.
    Revised edition, with bibliographic updates by Charles Bane and Sean M. Flory (Scarecrow Press, 2006). ISBN 978-0810857087
  • Slaughter, Joseph R. (2011). "Bildungsroman/Künstlerroman". In Logan, Peter Melville (ed.). The Encyclopedia of the Novel. 1. Oxford; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 93–97. ISBN 978-1-4051-6184-8.
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