Bildungsroman Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

"Guavas for Dummies, American Jíbaras, & Postnational Autonomy: When I Was Puerto Rican in the Hemispheric Turn" (2019) re-engages this text after I taught it in Puerto Rico four years. In this 2009 essay, Santiago’s memoir is said to bridge U.S. and Caribbean lit. WIWPR begins with a remembered Puerto Rico, and ends in the author’s adulthood in the USA. Studying Santiago’s text within a trajectory of immigrant narratives familiarizes the text to readers who are often processing their own entries into the US / its cultural orbit. This essay examines Santiago’s representation of jibaros, a subculture whose place in in Puerto Rico parallels the conflicted relationship many Jamaicans have with Rastafarians. Also, the theme of “Translating and Resisting Imperialism” is developed through a close reading of the chapter “The American Invasion of MacÚn.” Santiago’s treatment of gender roles in her family is also explored.

- by Gregory Stephens
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- American Literature, American History, Cultural Studies, Latin American Studies

En este trabajo se analiza la relación entre la alimentación, el hecho de alimentarse, y el crecimiento, desarrollo, evolución o Bildung en tres novelas del siglo XX: The Bell Jar, de Sylvia Plath, The Catcher in the Rye, de J.D.... more

- by Alejandra Lucía
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- English Literature, J.D. Salinger, Sylvia Plath, Bildungsroman
- by Mark U . Stein
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- Black British literature, Bildungsroman, Novel of transformation

This essay argues that L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between (1953) fits into the critical tradition of the Bildungsroman in one specific sense: its attention to matters of deception. First, this plot of formation and development involves a necessary apprenticeship in deception: a moral training that has links with everyday practices of concealment in linguistic construal, social etiquette, and interpersonal trust, whose presence I track in the novel. Second, the novel’s framing screens the salient context of its production, the “angry decade” of 1950s Britain. I consider Hartley’s conservative distance from other writing on childhood and youth in the period, suggesting that his representation of deception relates to his critique of social and moral erosion in the postwar period. In the loose vehicle of a Bildungsroman where development is compromised, Hartley presents a novel whose formal structure, in its use of deceptive tropes, affords both its turning away from historical difficulties and its indirect critique of failing morals.

- by Daniel Williams
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- British Literature, Philosophy Of Language, English Literature, The Novel
- by Isha Biswas
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- History, Feminist Theory, Victorian Studies, Socrates

Though individual genres have been studied in relation to postcolonial criticism, there has not, until now, been a critical intervention that considers what it is about genre itself that makes it useful for a postcolonial project and for writing contemporary Britain. This study analyses four new genres of literature and film that have evolved to accommodate and negotiate the changing face of postcolonial Britain since 1990. It reads shifting genre boundaries as a means of understanding shifting constructions of Britishness, arguing that both genres and nations have unstable boundaries that are, at least imaginatively, redrawn when the implications of postcolonial texts and contexts are taken into consideration. Questions of categorisation are always political, as borders are redrawn and criteria of inclusion and exclusion are negotiated, so genre fiction and film provide a unique space for exploring a contested national identity.

- by Sarah Ilott
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- Multiculturalism, Comedy, Postcolonial Studies, Gothic Literature

A Little Piece Of Ground presents the experience of young Palestinian boys living in Ramallah

- by Doaa Abdelghany
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- British Literature, Palestinian Literature, Young Adult Fiction, War on Terror
- by Ali Kaan Cakar
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- Dystopian Literature, Anthony Burgess, Postmodern Literature, Youth

The aim of the present study is to show what makes the protagonist of a Bildungsroman to be at the same time the hero of the monomyth. In order to achieve this purpose, after having defined and shown the essence of the Bildungsroman and the monomyth, we disclose the fictional pattern of the novel of formation with its thematic and structural elements interrelated to form a literary system, as well as the three-dimensional structure of the monomyth encompassing the aspects of separation-initiation-return. Finally, in matters of exemplification and practical argumentation, and relying on a comparative approach, we would reveal similarities and differences between the Bildungsroman and monomyth through textual reference to a particular novel, namely Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.

- by Tamer Karabakır
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- English Literature, Art, Victorian Literature, Bildungsroman

This article studies a version of female development contained in Elena Ferrante‘s My Brilliant Friend, one that opposes the typically male development of the Bildungsroman. The Neapolitan novels invoke ideologies of development often associated with the Bildungsroman but also carve out subversive paths to female Bildung. Viewing the relationship between the two protagonists, Lila and Elena, as modulated by generic tensions—one trajectory following the classical Bildung, the other resisting it—the article uses Rachel Blau DuPlessis‘s notion of transgressive narrative strategies, contending that the novels suggest a narrative of entanglement offering an alternative geometry of female development.

Este artículo plantea que The Tombs of Atuan es una novela de formación femenina que se aparta de los códigos tradicionales de la variante realista y hegemónica del subgénero. Esto debido a que presenta dos elementos no miméticos: un laberinto subterráneo como morada de dioses y la aparición de un mago. Ambos complejizan el proceso de crecimiento de la joven Tenar, su protagonista, e inciden en que su destino al final de la novela, pese a no culminar en una madurez plena, sí se abra a posibilidades alentadoras, distintas a las resoluciones fatalistas de la novela de formación femenina realista. Palabras clave: novela de formación femenina, literatura de fantasía, magia, laberinto, individuación.

- by Paula Rivera
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- Fantasy Literature, Ursula K. Le Guin, Bildungsroman, Female Bildungsroman
- by Paris Tsekouras
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- Ottoman History, Propaganda, Nationalism, Symbolism

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem Excelsior was published in 1841 and very soon came to be strongly associated with European Alpine mountaineering. Longfellow was influenced by German cultural approaches to mountains, mediated via the literature of the both the Sturm und Drang movement, German Idealism and pan-European Romanticism. The poem briefly recounts the tale of a young man struggling through Alpine peaks and passes to an unspecified fate near the Great St. Bernard Pass. Located by the faithful hounds of the monastery and half buried in snow, he still clutches in his icy hand ‘That banner with a strange device/Excelsior!’ Longfellow constructed his aesthetics of the infinite from Pre-Romantic, Sublime and Gothic elements but the literary topos of Excelsior owes most to German literary and philosophical sensibilities. This reverence for mountain landscapes and their symbolic importance was reinforced in German culture by romantic nationalism and the literature of young Germans’ self-discovery that had romanticized the ‘wild call of the mountains.’ The cult of doomed and evanescent youth is a feature of the Sturm und Drang. Above all, German Idealist thought found in the struggle to climb a mountain and attain a summit the perfect metaphor for the dialectical method and the teleological drive towards the Ideal, exemplified in Goethe’s Faust. The motifs of ascent, absorption into the Absolute and engagement in “aspiration without object” all place this within the domain of philosophical idealism. The phrase “Excelsior!” was adopted by mountaineers in the nineteenth century, Le Club Alpin Français choosing it as the club motto at the club’s foundation in 1874. It attained considerable cultural force amongst German speaking Alpinists experimenting with new forms of Lebensphilosophie that emphasized the cultivation of the will. The phrase lost much of its power through overuse, debasement, parody and ridicule but remains an epiphenomenal presence in literary appropriations of mountaineering.

- by Jonathan Westaway
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- Romanticism, Poetry, German Idealism, Mountaineering History

Na presente dissertação, serão abordadas as relações entre o romance de formação e a literatura juvenil nas literaturas de língua inglesa. Apesar de suas particularidades, os dois gêneros têm em comum o fato de apresentarem contornos pouco definidos. Sendo assim, serão discutidas questões teóricas pertinentes a cada um deles a fim de chegar ao ponto central do trabalho: descrever e caracterizar o que seria o Bildungsroman juvenil. Três obras foram escolhidas para análise, Grandes esperanças (1860), de Charles Dickens, O apanhador no campo de centeio (1951), de J.D. Salinger – que serão usados para falar da tradição do romance de formação e da sua evolução – e Bateria, garotas e a torta perigosa (2004), de Jordan Sonnenblick, escolhido como exemplo paradigmático da manifestação desse gênero na literatura juvenil.

- by Cássia Farias
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- Young Adult Literature, Bildungsroman, Romance de Formação, Literatura Juvenil

In dem Sammelband Ultima Ratio? (hg. von Scholz/Schuchter) wird die Frage verhandelt, ob bzw. inwiefern Gewalt für uns Ausnahmezustand ist oder vielmehr ein alltägliches Ereignis, d. h., ob wir uns permanent oder nur vorübergehend in Räumen und Zeiten der Gewalt aufhalten. Die Gewalt, die in Judith Schalanskys "Der Hals der Giraffe" eine zentrale Rolle einnimmt, ist nicht eine strukturelle Gewalt, sondern eine der Biologie. Es ist das Naturgesetz, unter dem vor allem die Biologielehrerin selbst, aber damit auch alle anderen in dieser Erzählung auftretenden Figuren und Konstellationen zu leiden haben.

- by Julia Boog
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- Violence, Heterotopia, Bildungsroman, Judith Schalansky

The purpose of this essay is to analyze how the novel ‘Invention of Wings’ can be seen as a Bildungsroman in the author's portrayal of Sarah’s and Handful’s struggle against mental and physical enslavement. I analyze the different incidents in the novel that portray the features of a Bildungsroman as well as the characters mental and physical enslavement.
The story is told from the first person point of view, with Sarah and Handful alternating, but Sarah can be considered the protagonist of the novel as she seems more prominent and dominating in the pages of the book.
This essay focuses on her life and pin-points the different parts of the story where the features of Bildungsroman are evident. I will examine the psychosomatic growth of Sarah as the novel begins when she is of eleven years old and ends in her adulthood. I explain how the author uses the genre to depict Sarah’s growth into a confident, vocal woman who campaigns for racial and gender rights.
The features of a Bildungsroman examined are: the protagonist’s psychological and moral growth, experiences that change the protagonist’s perspective, struggles, hardships faced in leaving home and on return, introspection and most importantly, attaining ultimate maturity in the end.
I also compare and contrast the physical and mental enslavement of the two women. Handful plays a vital part in Sarah’s struggles and the subsequent victory over her condition. The life of Handful, a slave, can also be seen parallel to that of Sarah’s growing up story, as Handful transcends the shackles of slavery that hold her down realizing the metaphorical meaning in the myth of Africans having wings that were supposed to help in flying to freedom. I conclude that the story of the two women’s struggles can indeed be seen as a Bildungsroman.

- by Apoorva Malepati
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- Abolition of Slavery, Anti-slavery, Bildungsroman
- by Deniz Nerez
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- Poverty, Child Development, Victorian Literature, Victorian novel

Straddling the millennia, in another era of great social transformation and uncertainty, the Harry Potter series emerges as a kind of postmodern Bildungsroman, charting a young person’s development (or Bildung) through a complex world of magic and reality. The advent of Harry Potter coincides (perhaps not coincidentally) with the emergence of a postmodern condition, in a world transformed by globalization and by mass media’s penetration of the remotest regions of the globe, where the assurances of a previous era no longer hold true. Magic adds greater wonder to the stories, but also provides a strategy for making sense of the world. The magical world of wizards, house elves, trolls, dragons, and Dementors, inter alia, constitutes a kind of meta-world, a realm just beyond the senses of most Muggles but which is intimately related to our own, often terrifyingly real, world (as is movingly portrayed in “The Other Minister” chapter of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince). J.K. Rowling’s powerful reversal of the notion of destiny—in showing that what some call fate is precisely the result of individual choices, whether it was Harry’s direction to the sorting hat (“Not Slytherin!”) in The Sorcerer’s Stone, or Voldemort’s self-fulfilling prophecy in choosing to kill Harry—offers powerful evidence that “the way of the world” is frequently what we make of it, a valuable lesson for students and teachers alike.

- by Robert Tally
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- Narrative, Children's and Young Adult Literature, Theory of the Novel, Postmodernism

This essay argues that Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go reshapes colonial subjec- tivity through a sense of loss.
By borrowing Homi Bhabha’s notion of mimicry, which char- acterizes colonial subjectivity as a state of ambivalence between assimilation and dissimilation, I explore how the clones’ collective retrospection posits Norfolk as the site of subject-forming loss and how Kathy’s narrative voice gradually signals the emptying
of self.

- by Ji Eun Lee
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- Kazuo Ishiguro, Bildungsroman, Mimicry, Postcolonial Bildungsroman
- by Elena Abou Mrad
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- American Literature, Comparative Literature, Gender Studies, Women's Literature

Tesi di laurea triennale discussa il 2 dicembre 2014 all'Università degli Studi di Milano. Relatore: Bruno Falcetto.

RESUMO: A fim de compartilhar o fórum de reflexões literárias concernentes ao Bildungsroman, o artigo que apresento resulta da minha pesquisa sobre a literatura de Novalis, a partir da compreensão dos contextos e debates... more

- by Maria Aparecida Barbosa
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- Novalis, Bildungsroman

The article uses the example of the European bildungsroman as represented paradigmatically in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795 – 96) to investigate the effects of reading. Goethe's text is sensitive to the embodied encounters that shape how we relate to the experience of reading, showing the forms of sensuous interaction in which literary reading has its roots. The model of reading presented in Goethe's text is contextualized with reference to debates about fiction circa 1800 but also to developmental psychology research into the emotional preconditions of an engagement with narrative and to recent discussions of the so-called paradox of fiction. To explore in more concrete terms the effect of reading Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, the article then turns to George Eliot's response in Daniel Deronda (1876). Goethe's novel appeals to the bodies of its characters and its readers. Eliot responds to this appeal by emphasizing that bodily reactions are themselves always shaped by history. However, it takes a certain sort of openness, which is learned more through interaction than through fiction, for characters and readers alike to confront the challenges and opportunities that an insight into the embodied nature of larger historical processes presents.

- by Ben Morgan
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- Embodied Cognition, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, George Eliot, Bildungsroman
- by Teresa Bermúdez-Montes
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- Gender Studies, Galician Studies, Narrative, Contemporary Literature

This paper seeks to study the relationship between the mother-daughter in two of her earliest novels; The Grass is Singing and Martha Quest, employing the ideas regarding this relationship discussed by Nancy Chodorow in her book The Reproduction of Mothering and argues that the protagonists of these two early novels by Lessing are essentially " matrophobic ". Their matrophobia, however, does not prevent them from being victims of the same fate as their mothers before them, particularly in the kind of lives they choose to lead and the marriages which trap the protagonists of both the novels.

INTRO: Merle Hodge‘s Crick Crack, Monkey, first published in 1970, is a significant text in the body of anglophone Caribbean literature. The term ―crick, crack‖ refers to a Caribbean oral tradition, call and response technique in which, at the beginning or end of a story or folktale, the storyteller calls "Crick?" and the audience responds "Crack!" The exchange signifies that both the audience and the storyteller are aware that the story is fictional or separate from reality. Crick Crack, Monkey is a bildungsroman or a coming-of-age novel that focuses on the development of a young female protagonist, Tee (Cynthia), in Trinidad. Readers witness the development of Tee under the care of her two aunts, Tantie (Rosa) and Beatrice.

- by Robin Brooks
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- Digital Humanities, Child Development, Women's Literature, Caribbean Literature

Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971) is a film about transitions: movement between childhood and adulthood, country and city, pre-modernity and modernity. My analysis of Roeg’s classic is part of a study of the genre of environmental film: representations or re-visioning of the human-nature relationship. I explore Walkabout’s transitions by observing how the film interweaves two coming-of-age stories: an aboriginal youth, Black Boy (David Gumpilil) on a walkabout (a trial to prove his readiness for manhood); and the Anglo children, Girl (Jenny Agutter) and White Boy (Lucien John, the director’s son), he rescues in the Australian outback, especially a girl on the threshold of womanhood. But these rites of passage in turn contribute to the film’s larger fabula told primarily through visual narrative: a critique of the post-industrial world’s attitudes towards nature, including its disconnect from (or repression of) what is untamed or natural in human nature.

In Mister Pip (2006), New Zealander writer Lloyd Jones transfers Charles Dickens' Great Expectations to Papua New Guinea. Through a skilful play of metanarrative cross-references, Jones gives lifeblood back to the Victorian text while creating a new artistic work in which the 19th century enters into a dialogue with contemporary times o ering its reader a modern 'female' Bildungsroman. This paper explores how Great Expectations turns out to be instrumental for the growth of Matilda, Jones's main character, and for the development of the plot in a way that invites us to reflect on the imaginative power of literature and the unpredictable nature of its consequences in the world outside literary fiction.

In Jean Pauls "Kardinalroman" sind zahlreiche Verweise auf den Schauerroman zu finden. Doch welche Funktion haben sie und welche Rolle spielt das "groteske Testament"? In: Barry Murnane/Andrew Cusack: (Hrsg.): Populäre Erscheinungen. Der... more

In Jean Pauls "Kardinalroman" sind zahlreiche Verweise auf den Schauerroman zu finden. Doch welche Funktion haben sie und welche Rolle spielt das "groteske Testament"?
In: Barry Murnane/Andrew Cusack: (Hrsg.): Populäre Erscheinungen. Der deutsche Schauerroman um 1800. Paderborn, München: Fink 2011, S. 269-290.

- by Matthias Bickenbach
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- German Literature, Gothic Literature, German literary history, Bildungsroman

Comentari de l'obra Quanta, quanta guerra... de Mercè Rodoreda.

- by Roger Soler
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- Mercè Rodoreda, Bildungsroman, Literatura catalana segle XX

Dickens shows in Great Expectations how strenuously difficult life can be in Victorian Age, with the struggle of working class opposed by the lavishness of decadent aristocracy and eminent changes that were taking place. By analysing Pip's journey through life from his poor childhood to his good fortunes of early adulthood it is clear how Pip is portrayed as an agent of social changes. How he actively pursues changes in his social condition and mingles among different classes due to the importance of his actions and, even more, his reactions to the world makes the hero of this novel a fine example of how a protagonist in a Bildungsroman invariably is a representative of the conflict of classes and the necessity of social reforms at the time.

The concept of bildungsroman is studied in the novels Great Expectations by Charles Dickens and The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt by integrating the experiences of the protagonists. Their character growths follow a similar arc as they start off as naive young boys and evolve into well experienced men. The struggles they face from a young age, and the way they deal with the problems of life, the choices they make and the beliefs they hold are examined. The characters they come across and the role they play in the development of the lives of the protagonists are also compared and contrasted.

- by Marie Aruna
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- Education, Bildungsroman, Great Expectations, The Goldfinch

The article offers a systematic critique of identity politics and intersectionality that today dominate Western mainstream literary theory and Anglo-Saxon literary production by bringing to the fore a much overlooked critical intervention on the part of materialist (literary) system theorists and Western Marxist feminists. It then dissects the ways in which the trappings of identity politics and its upgraded version of intersectionality are manifested in Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, with the class in the triad of class, race and gender eventually weakened and removed from view.

- by Lilijana Burcar
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- Capitalism, Bildungsroman, Sandra Cisneros, Housewifization

Se analizan las características de la autoficción que se presentan en la novela, haciendo énfasis en la cuestión de la formación identitaria de la autora-narradora-protagonista. Se retoman cuestiones de la figura de autor y las... more

- by Elizabeth Murcia
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- Self and Identity, Authorship, Mexican Literature, Autofiction