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 

Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre - before reading

Reading Journal - Session 5 - 22/11/2016

Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre

“Until Jane Eyre was kidnapped I don’t think anyone—least of all Hades—realised quite how popular she was. It was as if a living national embodiment of England’s literary heritage had been torn from the masses. It was the best piece of news we could have hoped for.” - Bowden Cable. Journal of a LiteraTec

Jasper Fforde. The Eyre Affair

While I have read literature in connection to Jane Eyre – the postcolonial prequel Wide Sargasso Sea dealing with the backstory of Rochester’s insane wife Bertha (of which I sadly remember very little) and the postcolonial novel The Eyre Affair about which I wrote my last term paper (which I can recommend and in which Jane Eyre gets kidnapped, thus forcing the heroine of the book, Thursday Next, to rescue her, whereby she accidentally alters the story to reflect the actual story of Jane Eyre) – I have not read the book itself. Through writing my term paper about The Eyre Affair (as well as the following three novels in the series) I feel like I know the gist and importance of the story already, but I am curious about the actual book and how the Victorian novel will actually be, after already being influences by feminist, postcolonial and postmodern influences, that criticized some aspects of the books, but also treated the source material with consideration and worthy of basing their own stories on. It is certainly well known and considered a classic and I am curious how it is going to fit into the “Life Narratives” seminar, as I would not have thought of it belonging to this category (but I also don’t know the details of the story or the way in which it is written).

      “It is well known, even 150 years after publication. For The Eyre Affair to have any resonance the featured novel had to be familiar and respected. If potential readers of my book haven't read Jane Eyre they might have seen the film, and if they haven't done either, they might still know that Jane is a heroine of Victorian romantic fiction. I don't know of many other books that can do this.“

     Jasper Fforde

Helga Schwalm - Autobiography

Reading Journal - Session 5 - 22/11/2016

Helga Schwalm – Autobiography (The handbook of narratology)

·         as a literary genre signifies a retrospective narrative that undertakes to tell the author’s own life, or a substantial part of it

·         seeking (at least in its classic version) to reconstruct his/her personal development within a given historical, social and cultural framework

·         claims to be factual and non-fictional, but is inevitably constructive, imaginative

·         self-fashioning

·         governing structural and semantic principle: comprehensive and continuous retrospection (based on memory)

·         struggle for truthfulness and creativity, between oblivion, concealment, hypocrisy, self-deception and self-conscious fictionalizing

·         Bildungsgeschichte, personality formation

·         focus on psychological introspection, sense of historicity, link btw author’s life and literary work

·         generally first-person narration with some exceptions (3^rd person, verse)

o   narrating I: experiencing subject

o   narrated I: narrating subject

o   present both as the end and condition of its narration

o   as subject continues to live, no “real” end  until “quasi-death”

o   real, historical I not always in tune with the narrating and experiencing I’s, but considered the real author and external subject of reference

·         ideological I

o   covert operation: concept of a personhood culturally available to the narrator when he tells the story

o   reflects the social and intertextual embedding of the autobiographical narrative

o   only through engagement with socially/culturally prefigured models can individuals represent themselves as subjects

·         sociological angle: form of social action making sense of a personal experience in terms of general relevance

·         historically: emergence of autobiography as a genre at the same time as the modern subject (~1800)

·         temporalization of experience

·         represent a unique individual

·         fragmentation: modern writers subvert chronology and split the subject, foregrounding visual and scenic/topographical components, highlighting role of language, conflating auto- and heterobiography, transforming lives into fiction

·         linked to critical history of subjectivity

·         past endowed with meaning in the light of the present

·         constructs an individual life as a coherent, meaningful whole

·         memoir: representing the individual as social type, confirming autographer’s place in the world

·         autobiography: focus on identity and memory

·         inextricable connection btw narrative and identity with autobiography as the prme generic site of enactment

·         autobiographical pact:

o   autobiography as an institutionalized communicative act where author and reader enter into a particular ‘contract

o   The author’s proper name refers to a singular autobiographical identity, identifying author, narrator and protagonist as one, and thus ensures the reading as autobiography.

·         new considerations: gender, postcolonial, eco-autobiography (relationship btw natural setting and the self, topographical figurations)

·         shifted from literary genre to a broad range of cultural practices that draw on and incorporate a multitude of textual modes and genres

This text tries to define autobiography in a changing historical context, mapping the development, different theories concerning it and the way it has changed in newer times, not only taking identity and memory into account, but also different influences and purposes that shape this identity, like consciousness of topography, gender, etc.). It is definitely easier to follow than Lejeune’s text which goes very much into detail concerning the different positions a narrator can occupy and how the reader has to be conscious of that. I certainly never thought of the many distinctions and developments concerning autobiographies that one can be aware of, but this text is a useful reference for the purpose and different trends in this genre, as well as a good reference for further reading material.

Philippe Lejeune - The Autobiographical Pact

Reading Journal – Session 5 – 22/11/2016

Philippe Lejeune – The Autobiographical Pact

·         relations btw biography/autobiography and novel/autobiography

·         attempt of a definition from the reader’s perspective, starting after 1770

·         autobiography:

o   Retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality

§  form of language (narrative; in prose)

§  subject treated (individual life, story of a personality)

§  situation of the author (author/narrator are identical)

§  position of the narrator (narrator/principal character identical; retrospective point of view of the narrative)

o   mainly narrative, but with consideration to discourse

o   mainly retrospective, but can also take other shapes in part (self-portrait, journal of the work ...)

o   primarily individual life, but chronical and social or political history as well

o   question of hierarchy

o   but author, narrator and protagonist must be identical:

·         I, the Undersigned

o   reference

o   utterance

o   oral discourse

§  quotation

§  oral from a distance

·         autobiographical novel: reader has reason to assume that author and narrator/character are the same, while author/narrator deny this

o   personal, impersonal narratives; different degrees

·         autobiographical pact: story told is that of the author, however they choose to tell it

·         biography, autobiography are referential texts, resembling the truth

·         biography: resemblance grounds identity

·         autobiography: identity grounds resemblance

·         phantasmatic pact: revealing phantasms of the individual

·         autobiography: lacks complexity, ambiguity ...

·         novel: lacks accuracy

This text goes to great lengths to establish the differences btw autobiography, biography and the modes in between by focusing especially on the relationship btw the author, narrator and protagonist, how identical, different or ambiguous it is on what degrees are possible. I certainly never thought in detail about these varying degrees and was not aware that so many are possible.  Lejeune does try to explain his claims, tables and models, but since some distinctions are rather minimal, it is sometimes hard to follow what exactly he is trying to establish. But it is certainly a helpful text when examining another one in detail and trying to determine which category it best belongs to because the criteria established by Lejeune seem easy enough to apply.