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Learn about the Bildungsroman genre, from traditional definitions to postcolonial revisions, with examples like "Great Expectations" and "Mill on the Floss." Delve into themes of socialization, identity, and growth in literature.
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Outline • Bildungsroman: definitions, tradition & revisions (including examples) • Postcolonializing Bildungsroman • About the course (next week: Annie John) • Works Cited
Traditional Bildungsroman: Definitions • Bildung* = formation, education, whose meanings vary in different social contexts • Bildungsroman: “in a broad sense …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 qtd in Hardin xiii). • “coming of age”(story of growth); “apprentice of life”
Traditional Bildungsroman: Definitions (2) • “the theme of the Bildungsroman is the history of a young man ‘who enters into life in a blissful state of ignorance, seeks related souls, experiences friendship and love, struggles with the hard realities of the world and thus armed with a variety of experiences, matures, finds himself and his mission in the world." (Diltheyqtd in Hardin xiv). • Prototype: Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship(1795)
Bildungsroman vs. Picaresque novel Bildungsroman Picaresque novel e.g. 18th century novels such as Moll Flanders and Tom Jones Episodic; materialistic Moral, spiritual and intellectual development (progress)
Traditional Bildungsroman: Types • Entwicklungsroman (novel of general growth, subjective unfolding of an individual) • the Erziehungsroman (novel of educational development, an objective process observed from the view point of an educator, Moretti 16-17) and • the Kunstlerroman (novel of artistic realization). • Contemporary: Catcher in the Rye, Harry Potter
Growth as Socialization (Moretti 11) and “normalization” (repression)
Example (1)Great Expectations (1867) Charles Dickens; (1974) Joseph Hardy 1. Lack and stimulus: Ms. Havisham & Estella Image source: Project Gutenberg & Amazon
Example (1)Great Expectations (1867) Charles Dickens 2. Socialization: Pip vs. Magwitch A real gentleman vs. a snob Image source: Wikipedia
Major Challenges Identity White, Male, Middle-Class, Heterosexual & Rational Enlighten-ment Subject Feminist Modernist Poststructuralist Postcolonial
English Studies & Feminist Critique • Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding.Jerome Hamilton Buckley. (1974). • The Voyage in: fictions of female development. Eds. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland. (1983) • The Myth of the Heroine: The Female Bildungsroman in the Twentieth Century . Esther Kleinbord Labovitz (1986) • Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change. Felski, Rita.(1989).
Example (2)Mill on the FlossGeorge Eliot (1860)BBC series (1978) Maggie’s Romantic & Timeless Childhood
Example (2) Mill on the Floss on childhood Life did change for Tom and Maggie; and yet they were not wrong in believing that the thoughts and loves of these first years would always make part of their lives. We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, - if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass; the same hips and haws on the autumn's hedgerows; the same redbreasts that we used to call "God's birds," because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known? (36)
Bildungsroman in the 19th Century: Male vs. Female Women’s Plot: • Marriage: Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch • “Failure” in Death:Mill on the Floss, The Awakening, The Return of the Native, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Modernist Bildungsroman • Epiphanic (sometimes fragmentary); open-ended and relativistic (non-teleological); artist growth • Alienated from a society/universe which is chaotic or materialistic; e.g. -- Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce) -- Sons and Lovers (D.H. Lawrence) -- Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf); Song of the Lark (Willa Cather)… two extremes – defeat & humiliation on one hand, and disillusionment, alienation and reflection on the other (Hardin xv; xxiii )
Example (3) Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man • A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face. *… • —Heavenly God! cried Stephen's soul, in an outburst of profane joy. • He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him.
Example (3) Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (2) • Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on! (chap 4)
Post-Structuralist Challenges • genre vs. genericity* (work vs. text & textuality): “every text pαrticipates in one of several genres, there is no genreless text [. . .] yet such participation never amounts to belonging" (Derrida qtd in Hoagland 2). • Genre: supports certain worldviews and ideologies* • Its porous boundaries can be productive, revealing its ideological moorings.
Post-Structuralist Challenges (2) • identity: [neither essential, nor coherent] as a process of identification, subjectivity as subjectivation (being subject to; entering the symbolic order…) • gender: constructed on daily basis, as a form of dress, as performative • Childhood (next slide)
Post-Structuralist Challenges (3) • Childhood • “Childhood is …at once a story and structure of feeling - a narrative of experiences and a mode of telling - that emerges from our desire to hold the self together as we come of age in modern time and attempt make sense of our personal and collective histories.”(Bell 21)
PostcolonialRevisions Identity “Self-Othered” or Communal -- Protracted, more difficult -- ambivalent, “un-learning” imperialist culture -- trauma -- diasporic & transcultural*
About the Course Bildungsroman Where am I. A window, blinds half opened, the maple and beautybush and smilax catching the lamplight, nodding as if a silent chorus. Beyond, the flood of the nothing audience. How much easier it is to address you when I cannot see you, turned dark, in the blackness of the sure mistake. Peter Streckfus
Example (4) Annie John --”ab ovo” origin? -- mother-daughter -- un-learning?
Bell, Katherine. Troping the timeless : ontological desires and the representation of childhood in coming-of-age narratives. Ottawa : Library and Archives Canada = Bibliothèque et Archives Canada, [2010]. Ph. D. York University 2009. • Hardin, James, ed. Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman. Columbia, S.C.: U of South Caroina P, 1991. • Hoagland, Ericka. Postcolonializing the Bildungsroman: A Study of the Evolution of a Genre. Dissertation. Purdue: Purdue UP, 2006. • Moretti, Franco, Albert Sbragia. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. Verso, 2000. Works Cited
