Petra Rau - Bildungsroman

Reading Journal – Session  6 – 29/11/2016

Petra Rau – Bildungsroman

·         the novel of personal development or of education

·         protagonist’s actual or metaphorical journey from youth to maturity

·         aim of journey reconciliation between the desire for individuation (self-fulfilment) and the demands of socialisation (adaptation to a given social reality)

·         subjectivity, conflict btw. self and society

·         novels concerned with psychological characterization and questions of identity use Bildungsrom-elements

·         originated in Germany in the 18^th cent., heyday in the 19^th cent.

o   due to class conflicts, social change, educational reforms in Europe, Britain

·         Within Anglo-American literary criticism, the elastic definition of “novel of development” is still quite common and regarded as useful, because the notion of development accommodates a range of discursive fields; but it also loses the entire historic and cultural specificity of the original idea.

·         most examples in the 19^th cent. can be found in French and English, while Germans focused on the novella

·         female Bildungsroman emerges at the same time as the male counterpart and survives the 20^th cent. crises much better

·         Edgeworth and Austen are the first to depart from the ideals of sentiment and feeling in favor of a clear sense of reality, emotional and sexual self-control, economic awareness and independence of mind, while retaining a witty and ironic style

o   subgenre: novel of adultery

·         often also criticized as a genre and written against

o   its central aim is to show how characters are determined by their genetic heritage or their environment with little room for ideals of individuation or social integration

o   the subjects of the naturalist novels are mostly working-class outsiders whose lives are a steady descent into greater crime, deprivation and degeneration

·         subgenre: novel of awakening

o   replacing novel of adultery, focusing on women as wives and mothers

o   refuting the entire bourgeois idea of love-and-marriage as claptrap

·         modernist writing rejected linear plot and development of protagonist, but rather focused on memory, consciousness and epiphanies

·         resurrected in the 1950s/60s in the wake of feminist movements and left political agendas

·         increasingly popular with those ideologies and theories that claimed subject status for hitherto invisible or marginalized groups: women, socialists and the working-class, gay men and lesbians, and non-whites

·         postmodernism:  Often the label Bildungsroman (or anti-Bildungsroman) is employed on the basis of intertextual references. Conventional developmental trajectories are now also used to trace the development of psycho-pathological personalities, dysfunctional characters or societies

This text traces the emergence of the genre Bildungsroman in the 18^th century and the historical developments it underwent onwards, counter-movements as well as other genres it brought into existence, especially focusing on the female point of view there with the novel of adultery and awakening respectively. It discusses the crisis it suffered in the 20^th century as well as the reasons for its newfound popularity in the middle of the century due to marginalized groups reclaiming it for their own purposes. The is a comprehensive and easy read, providing good background information for the genre of the Bildungsroman.


Link to picture