Michael Bell
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199208098
- eISBN:
- 9780191709227
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199208098.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature, European Literature
This book reflects on humanistic education by examining the limits of the teachable in this domain. The Goethean motif of the open secret is not a mystery revealed but an utterance not understood, ...
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This book reflects on humanistic education by examining the limits of the teachable in this domain. The Goethean motif of the open secret is not a mystery revealed but an utterance not understood, the likely fate of all instruction based purely on authority. This study reviews the pedagogical relationship in the European Bildungsroman from the point of view of the mentor rather than that of the young hero, but it also extends beyond the novel to encompass works in which the category of fiction has a crucial and constitutive function, for a growing awareness of limited authority on the part of the mentor figures is closely related to fictive self-consciousness in the texts. Rousseau's semi-novelised treatise, Emile, is relatively unaware of the fictive nature of its own authority; whereas in Sterne, Wieland, Goethe, and Nietzsche, the situation is reversed, culminating in the conscious impasse of authority in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. While all these latter writers achieve their impact despite, indeed because of their internal scepticism, in the three subsequent writers, Lawrence, Leavis, and Coetzee, the impasse becomes more literal as the authority of Bildung is eroded in the wider culture. Yet in all cases, awareness of pedagogical authority as a species of fiction, to be exercised in an aesthetic spirit, is a significant prophylactic against the perennial pressure of reductive conceptions of education as instructional ‘production’.Less
This book reflects on humanistic education by examining the limits of the teachable in this domain. The Goethean motif of the open secret is not a mystery revealed but an utterance not understood, the likely fate of all instruction based purely on authority. This study reviews the pedagogical relationship in the European Bildungsroman from the point of view of the mentor rather than that of the young hero, but it also extends beyond the novel to encompass works in which the category of fiction has a crucial and constitutive function, for a growing awareness of limited authority on the part of the mentor figures is closely related to fictive self-consciousness in the texts. Rousseau's semi-novelised treatise, Emile, is relatively unaware of the fictive nature of its own authority; whereas in Sterne, Wieland, Goethe, and Nietzsche, the situation is reversed, culminating in the conscious impasse of authority in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. While all these latter writers achieve their impact despite, indeed because of their internal scepticism, in the three subsequent writers, Lawrence, Leavis, and Coetzee, the impasse becomes more literal as the authority of Bildung is eroded in the wider culture. Yet in all cases, awareness of pedagogical authority as a species of fiction, to be exercised in an aesthetic spirit, is a significant prophylactic against the perennial pressure of reductive conceptions of education as instructional ‘production’.
Kenneth Millard
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748621736
- eISBN:
- 9780748651740
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748621736.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This book explores the ways in which a range of recent American novelists have handled the genre of the ‘coming-of-age’ novel, or the Bildungsroman. Novels of this genre characteristically dramatise ...
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This book explores the ways in which a range of recent American novelists have handled the genre of the ‘coming-of-age’ novel, or the Bildungsroman. Novels of this genre characteristically dramatise the vicissitudes of growing up and the trials and tribulations of young adulthood, often presented through depictions of immediate family relationships and other social structures. The book considers a variety of different American cultures (in terms of race, class and gender) and a range of contemporary coming-of-age novels, so that aesthetic judgements about the fiction might be made in the context of the social history that fiction represents. A series of questions are asked: Does the coming-of-age moment in these novels coincide with an interpretation of the ‘fall’ of America?; What kind of national commentary does it therefore facilitate?; Is the Bildungsroman a quintessentially American genre?; What can it usefully tell us about contemporary American culture? Although the focus is on the contemporary period, this is placed in the context of reference to earlier novels and criticism of the genre, as well as historical changes in the status of the family, and the adolescent within it.Less
This book explores the ways in which a range of recent American novelists have handled the genre of the ‘coming-of-age’ novel, or the Bildungsroman. Novels of this genre characteristically dramatise the vicissitudes of growing up and the trials and tribulations of young adulthood, often presented through depictions of immediate family relationships and other social structures. The book considers a variety of different American cultures (in terms of race, class and gender) and a range of contemporary coming-of-age novels, so that aesthetic judgements about the fiction might be made in the context of the social history that fiction represents. A series of questions are asked: Does the coming-of-age moment in these novels coincide with an interpretation of the ‘fall’ of America?; What kind of national commentary does it therefore facilitate?; Is the Bildungsroman a quintessentially American genre?; What can it usefully tell us about contemporary American culture? Although the focus is on the contemporary period, this is placed in the context of reference to earlier novels and criticism of the genre, as well as historical changes in the status of the family, and the adolescent within it.
Tobias Boes
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801451775
- eISBN:
- 9780801465659
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801451775.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
The Bildungsroman, or “novel of formation,” has long led a paradoxical life within literary studies, having been construed both as a peculiarly German genre, a marker of that country's cultural ...
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The Bildungsroman, or “novel of formation,” has long led a paradoxical life within literary studies, having been construed both as a peculiarly German genre, a marker of that country's cultural difference from Western Europe, and as a universal expression of modernity. This book argues that the dual status of the Bildungsroman renders this novelistic form an elegant way to negotiate the diverging critical discourses surrounding national and world literature. Since the late eighteenth century, authors have employed the story of a protagonist's journey into maturity as a powerful tool with which to facilitate the creation of national communities among their readers. Such attempts always stumble over what the book calls “cosmopolitan remainders,” identity claims that resist nationalism's aim for closure in the normative regime of the nation-state. These cosmopolitan remainders are responsible for the curiously hesitant endings of so many novels of formation. The book presents readings of a number of novels—Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Karl Leberecht Immermann's The Epigones, Gustav Freytag's Debit and Credit, Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus among them—that have always been felt to be particularly “German” and compares them with novels by such authors as George Eliot and James Joyce to show that what seem to be markers of national particularity can productively be read as topics of world literature.Less
The Bildungsroman, or “novel of formation,” has long led a paradoxical life within literary studies, having been construed both as a peculiarly German genre, a marker of that country's cultural difference from Western Europe, and as a universal expression of modernity. This book argues that the dual status of the Bildungsroman renders this novelistic form an elegant way to negotiate the diverging critical discourses surrounding national and world literature. Since the late eighteenth century, authors have employed the story of a protagonist's journey into maturity as a powerful tool with which to facilitate the creation of national communities among their readers. Such attempts always stumble over what the book calls “cosmopolitan remainders,” identity claims that resist nationalism's aim for closure in the normative regime of the nation-state. These cosmopolitan remainders are responsible for the curiously hesitant endings of so many novels of formation. The book presents readings of a number of novels—Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Karl Leberecht Immermann's The Epigones, Gustav Freytag's Debit and Credit, Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus among them—that have always been felt to be particularly “German” and compares them with novels by such authors as George Eliot and James Joyce to show that what seem to be markers of national particularity can productively be read as topics of world literature.
Patrick Parrinder
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199264858
- eISBN:
- 9780191698989
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199264858.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Dickens is the one author who embodies the Englishness of novels. He wrote novels that inspired the nation. They were mostly centred in the city. He portrayed ordinary people as heroes. Most of the ...
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Dickens is the one author who embodies the Englishness of novels. He wrote novels that inspired the nation. They were mostly centred in the city. He portrayed ordinary people as heroes. Most of the popular characters that he used were those who lived in London. Another feature of his work is the division of public and private spheres. Dickens perceived the English state as becoming consumed with the corruption of its institutions and a resistance to social change. Novels that deal with male Bildungsroman are also discussed in the chapter. These novels typically portray young men from the province who eventually grow up and discover their role in society. A famous example of this kind of work is Dick Whittington, an ordinary boy who eventually became a rich city merchant. The chapter ends by discussing this idea in detail.Less
Dickens is the one author who embodies the Englishness of novels. He wrote novels that inspired the nation. They were mostly centred in the city. He portrayed ordinary people as heroes. Most of the popular characters that he used were those who lived in London. Another feature of his work is the division of public and private spheres. Dickens perceived the English state as becoming consumed with the corruption of its institutions and a resistance to social change. Novels that deal with male Bildungsroman are also discussed in the chapter. These novels typically portray young men from the province who eventually grow up and discover their role in society. A famous example of this kind of work is Dick Whittington, an ordinary boy who eventually became a rich city merchant. The chapter ends by discussing this idea in detail.
Eleanor Ty
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252040887
- eISBN:
- 9780252099380
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252040887.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
Asianfail examines literary and filmic works by contemporary Asian Americans and Asian Canadians that deal with failure and unhappiness. While the hashtag #Asianfail pokes fun at cultural ...
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Asianfail examines literary and filmic works by contemporary Asian Americans and Asian Canadians that deal with failure and unhappiness. While the hashtag #Asianfail pokes fun at cultural stereotypes of Asians on social media, the myth of the model minority has serious negative consequences for many young people who feel pressure and anxiety when they do not succeed in professional careers. This book looks at how novelists, such as Ruth Ozeki, Madeleine Thien, Alex Gilvarry, and lê thi diem thúy reveal the "cruel optimism" that characterizes ordinary existence for many people in the 21st century. Films such as The Debut, Red Doors,and Saving Face query immigrant aspirations of the older generation and the feasibility of the American dream. The protagonists in the graphic novels of Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, Keshni Kashyap and Mari Araki express their ugly and painful feelings as they grow up, while Jan Wong and Catherine Hernandez grapple with work and stress-related depression. In Linda Ohama's Obaachan's Garden and Catherine Hernandez' performance, even the aged feel precarity and are burdened with secrets of the past. These works interrogate and expose the limits of our neoliberal notions of the good life and happiness.Less
Asianfail examines literary and filmic works by contemporary Asian Americans and Asian Canadians that deal with failure and unhappiness. While the hashtag #Asianfail pokes fun at cultural stereotypes of Asians on social media, the myth of the model minority has serious negative consequences for many young people who feel pressure and anxiety when they do not succeed in professional careers. This book looks at how novelists, such as Ruth Ozeki, Madeleine Thien, Alex Gilvarry, and lê thi diem thúy reveal the "cruel optimism" that characterizes ordinary existence for many people in the 21st century. Films such as The Debut, Red Doors,and Saving Face query immigrant aspirations of the older generation and the feasibility of the American dream. The protagonists in the graphic novels of Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, Keshni Kashyap and Mari Araki express their ugly and painful feelings as they grow up, while Jan Wong and Catherine Hernandez grapple with work and stress-related depression. In Linda Ohama's Obaachan's Garden and Catherine Hernandez' performance, even the aged feel precarity and are burdened with secrets of the past. These works interrogate and expose the limits of our neoliberal notions of the good life and happiness.
Michael G. Cronin
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780719086137
- eISBN:
- 9781781704707
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719086137.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book studies the twentieth-century Irish Catholic Bildungsroman. This comparative examination of six Irish novelists tracks the historical evolution of a literary genre and its significant role ...
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This book studies the twentieth-century Irish Catholic Bildungsroman. This comparative examination of six Irish novelists tracks the historical evolution of a literary genre and its significant role in Irish culture. With chapters on James Joyce and Kate O'Brien, along with studies of Maura Laverty, Patrick Kavanagh, Edna O'Brien and John McGahern, this book offers a fresh new approach to the study of twentieth-century Irish writing and of the twentieth-century novel. Combining the study of literature and of archival material, the book also develops a new interpretive framework for studying the history of sexuality in twentieth-century Ireland. The book addresses itself to a wide set of interdisciplinary questions about Irish sexuality, modernity and post-colonial development, as well as Irish literature.Less
This book studies the twentieth-century Irish Catholic Bildungsroman. This comparative examination of six Irish novelists tracks the historical evolution of a literary genre and its significant role in Irish culture. With chapters on James Joyce and Kate O'Brien, along with studies of Maura Laverty, Patrick Kavanagh, Edna O'Brien and John McGahern, this book offers a fresh new approach to the study of twentieth-century Irish writing and of the twentieth-century novel. Combining the study of literature and of archival material, the book also develops a new interpretive framework for studying the history of sexuality in twentieth-century Ireland. The book addresses itself to a wide set of interdisciplinary questions about Irish sexuality, modernity and post-colonial development, as well as Irish literature.
Daniel Aureliano Newman
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474439619
- eISBN:
- 9781474459716
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474439619.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Modernist Life Histories explores how new biological models of embryonic development in the first half of the twentieth century helped inspire new kinds of coming-of-age plots. Focusing on novels by ...
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Modernist Life Histories explores how new biological models of embryonic development in the first half of the twentieth century helped inspire new kinds of coming-of-age plots. Focusing on novels by E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley and Samuel Beckett, the book links narrative experiments with shuffled chronology, repeated beginnings and sex change to new discoveries in the biological sciences. It reveals new connections between the so-called Two Cultures by highlighting how scientific ideas and narratives enter the literary realm.Less
Modernist Life Histories explores how new biological models of embryonic development in the first half of the twentieth century helped inspire new kinds of coming-of-age plots. Focusing on novels by E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley and Samuel Beckett, the book links narrative experiments with shuffled chronology, repeated beginnings and sex change to new discoveries in the biological sciences. It reveals new connections between the so-called Two Cultures by highlighting how scientific ideas and narratives enter the literary realm.
Michael Bell
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199208098
- eISBN:
- 9780191709227
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199208098.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature, European Literature
This chapter introduces the central concern of the book: how to recognise and to think cogently about the limits of humanistic pedagogy. It does so by explaining two continuing motifs; the ...
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This chapter introduces the central concern of the book: how to recognise and to think cogently about the limits of humanistic pedagogy. It does so by explaining two continuing motifs; the pedagogical circle is used by analogy with the hermeneutic circle. Whereas the hermeneutic circle suggests a possibly self-fulfilling process whereby interpretation is unwittingly governed by its necessary premises, the pedagogical circle sees a similarly closed logic in guided instruction, but now exacerbated by the factor of authority. The result of such instruction may be the ‘open secret’: a truth or recognition which, even as it is frankly imparted and is apparently understood, remains a secret because the listener does not yet possess the necessary experience. The remainder of the chapter provides an anticipatory summary of the argument, including the modern genesis of the Bildungsroman in the era of the philosophical tale and the novel of sentiment.Less
This chapter introduces the central concern of the book: how to recognise and to think cogently about the limits of humanistic pedagogy. It does so by explaining two continuing motifs; the pedagogical circle is used by analogy with the hermeneutic circle. Whereas the hermeneutic circle suggests a possibly self-fulfilling process whereby interpretation is unwittingly governed by its necessary premises, the pedagogical circle sees a similarly closed logic in guided instruction, but now exacerbated by the factor of authority. The result of such instruction may be the ‘open secret’: a truth or recognition which, even as it is frankly imparted and is apparently understood, remains a secret because the listener does not yet possess the necessary experience. The remainder of the chapter provides an anticipatory summary of the argument, including the modern genesis of the Bildungsroman in the era of the philosophical tale and the novel of sentiment.
Michael Bell
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199208098
- eISBN:
- 9780191709227
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199208098.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature, European Literature
This chapter provides an exposition of Rousseau's Emile in relation to the question of pedagogy's intrinsic blindness to the limits of its own authority. In its successive drafts, Rousseau's treatise ...
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This chapter provides an exposition of Rousseau's Emile in relation to the question of pedagogy's intrinsic blindness to the limits of its own authority. In its successive drafts, Rousseau's treatise was increasingly novelised and is commonly referred to as a novel. That Rousseau should have turned to novelistic methods reflects the important affinity between the educational process and the novel form and he gives many principled suggestions which were to be taken up in the later tradition of the Bildungsroman, including his central principle of delay, his utopianism, and his historical contextualising. But Emile is not itself a novel, and indeed remains blind to what might be at stake in the slippage of categories between educational treatise and fiction. This slippage denotes Rousseau's significant blindness to the question of authority: he cannot recognise how imaginary is his own exercise of authority in the text.Less
This chapter provides an exposition of Rousseau's Emile in relation to the question of pedagogy's intrinsic blindness to the limits of its own authority. In its successive drafts, Rousseau's treatise was increasingly novelised and is commonly referred to as a novel. That Rousseau should have turned to novelistic methods reflects the important affinity between the educational process and the novel form and he gives many principled suggestions which were to be taken up in the later tradition of the Bildungsroman, including his central principle of delay, his utopianism, and his historical contextualising. But Emile is not itself a novel, and indeed remains blind to what might be at stake in the slippage of categories between educational treatise and fiction. This slippage denotes Rousseau's significant blindness to the question of authority: he cannot recognise how imaginary is his own exercise of authority in the text.
Terence Cave
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199604807
- eISBN:
- 9780191731624
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199604807.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
The chapter begins with Carlyle’s landmark translation of Wilhelm Meister and its preface, which singles Mignon out for lyrical praise. It then passes to Walter Scott’s romance Peveril of the Peak, ...
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The chapter begins with Carlyle’s landmark translation of Wilhelm Meister and its preface, which singles Mignon out for lyrical praise. It then passes to Walter Scott’s romance Peveril of the Peak, published in the same decade, where the character Fenella is explicitly based on Mignon. Three of Bulwer Lytton’s experiments in the Bildungsroman, all of which have characters belonging to the Mignon family, and which exhibit a combination of high moral tone and exotic fantasy, represent the next phase of Mignon’s naturalization in Britain. Subsequently, the interest of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes in Goethe’s novel, first displayed publicly in the 1850s, forms the prelude to a discussion of Caterina (in ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’) and Mirah (in Daniel Deronda) as complex responses to Mignon’s story. The later spread of the Mignon craze to England is charted via a number of popular novels by women writers.Less
The chapter begins with Carlyle’s landmark translation of Wilhelm Meister and its preface, which singles Mignon out for lyrical praise. It then passes to Walter Scott’s romance Peveril of the Peak, published in the same decade, where the character Fenella is explicitly based on Mignon. Three of Bulwer Lytton’s experiments in the Bildungsroman, all of which have characters belonging to the Mignon family, and which exhibit a combination of high moral tone and exotic fantasy, represent the next phase of Mignon’s naturalization in Britain. Subsequently, the interest of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes in Goethe’s novel, first displayed publicly in the 1850s, forms the prelude to a discussion of Caterina (in ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’) and Mirah (in Daniel Deronda) as complex responses to Mignon’s story. The later spread of the Mignon craze to England is charted via a number of popular novels by women writers.
Carol J. Singley
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199779390
- eISBN:
- 9780199895106
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199779390.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
Adoption fiction flourished in the mid-nineteenth century, reflecting a new republican conception of family as a nonhierarchical grouping of individuals whose will to be together is as important as ...
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Adoption fiction flourished in the mid-nineteenth century, reflecting a new republican conception of family as a nonhierarchical grouping of individuals whose will to be together is as important as blood ties. Writers enlisted the trope of adoption to set the terms upon which a white middle class would develop. The little known novel, Laura Huntley, by Maria Browne (1850), addresses anxieties about immigration and urbanization through a couple’s adoption of an abandoned infant. The novel also reflects changes in child rearing practices and the shift from Calvinist to more sentimental theology when Laura’s adoptive parents curb her misbehavior and guide her to meet expectations for piety, obedience, and respect consonant with those of the developing nation.Less
Adoption fiction flourished in the mid-nineteenth century, reflecting a new republican conception of family as a nonhierarchical grouping of individuals whose will to be together is as important as blood ties. Writers enlisted the trope of adoption to set the terms upon which a white middle class would develop. The little known novel, Laura Huntley, by Maria Browne (1850), addresses anxieties about immigration and urbanization through a couple’s adoption of an abandoned infant. The novel also reflects changes in child rearing practices and the shift from Calvinist to more sentimental theology when Laura’s adoptive parents curb her misbehavior and guide her to meet expectations for piety, obedience, and respect consonant with those of the developing nation.
Carol J. Singley
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199779390
- eISBN:
- 9780199895106
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199779390.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
Edith Wharton’s Summer (1917) signals the death of romantic myths of adoption and nation building. Rescued from a renegade Mountain community, Charity bears a name ironically referencing acts of ...
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Edith Wharton’s Summer (1917) signals the death of romantic myths of adoption and nation building. Rescued from a renegade Mountain community, Charity bears a name ironically referencing acts of child saving in nineteenth-century adoption narratives. Reflecting the novel’s World War I context, Charity’s is a refugee, then a rebel, as she copes first with adoption by and then with marriage to her adoptive father after a brief love affair leaves her pregnant. Charity’s decision to raise rather than abort or abandon her child anticipates twentieth-century issues facing birth mothers, just as her marked ethnicity positions the novel in a larger dialogue about nationhood, race, and eugenics. Charity improves the quality of her lineage and implicitly of the nation but loses her bid for autonomy.Less
Edith Wharton’s Summer (1917) signals the death of romantic myths of adoption and nation building. Rescued from a renegade Mountain community, Charity bears a name ironically referencing acts of child saving in nineteenth-century adoption narratives. Reflecting the novel’s World War I context, Charity’s is a refugee, then a rebel, as she copes first with adoption by and then with marriage to her adoptive father after a brief love affair leaves her pregnant. Charity’s decision to raise rather than abort or abandon her child anticipates twentieth-century issues facing birth mothers, just as her marked ethnicity positions the novel in a larger dialogue about nationhood, race, and eugenics. Charity improves the quality of her lineage and implicitly of the nation but loses her bid for autonomy.
Sarah V. Eldridge and Allen Speight (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- August 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190859268
- eISBN:
- 9780190859299
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190859268.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre served as a touchstone for major philosophical and literary figures of his age (including, among many others, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, ...
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Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre served as a touchstone for major philosophical and literary figures of his age (including, among many others, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and Novalis). But it has received far less attention in both disciplines (especially in English-language scholarship) than either Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther or Elective Affinities. This volume takes up the question of what Goethe’s long and rather complicated novel is doing and how it engages with problems and themes of human life more generally, including issues of individuality, development, and authority; aesthetic formation and narrative (and human) contingency; gender, sexuality, and marriage; and power, institutions, and control.Less
Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre served as a touchstone for major philosophical and literary figures of his age (including, among many others, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and Novalis). But it has received far less attention in both disciplines (especially in English-language scholarship) than either Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther or Elective Affinities. This volume takes up the question of what Goethe’s long and rather complicated novel is doing and how it engages with problems and themes of human life more generally, including issues of individuality, development, and authority; aesthetic formation and narrative (and human) contingency; gender, sexuality, and marriage; and power, institutions, and control.
Jesse Rosenthal
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780691196640
- eISBN:
- 9781400883738
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691196640.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter focuses on the Bildungsroman, studying the philosophical and literary significance of the novel of development. Through readings of Margaret Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks (1866), Johann ...
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This chapter focuses on the Bildungsroman, studying the philosophical and literary significance of the novel of development. Through readings of Margaret Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks (1866), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, and John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, it suggests that the ethical foundations of the concept of Bildung—and in particular the idea of sensus communis (common sense)—made form in the Bildungsroman, lay the groundwork for one's own understanding of what makes a novel count as an object of study. The operating principle in the narrative structure of the Bildungsroman is the discovery that one is already a member of a community, and that one's decisions can be understood as stemming from that community. Proper cultivation means the development of a character that can understand and respond to the pre-existing, yet unconscious, shared consensus: the sensus communis. This sort of reciprocity between individual and community is actually a better description of how moral intuition worked, at its more refined levels, than references to physical sensation.Less
This chapter focuses on the Bildungsroman, studying the philosophical and literary significance of the novel of development. Through readings of Margaret Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks (1866), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, and John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, it suggests that the ethical foundations of the concept of Bildung—and in particular the idea of sensus communis (common sense)—made form in the Bildungsroman, lay the groundwork for one's own understanding of what makes a novel count as an object of study. The operating principle in the narrative structure of the Bildungsroman is the discovery that one is already a member of a community, and that one's decisions can be understood as stemming from that community. Proper cultivation means the development of a character that can understand and respond to the pre-existing, yet unconscious, shared consensus: the sensus communis. This sort of reciprocity between individual and community is actually a better description of how moral intuition worked, at its more refined levels, than references to physical sensation.
Ian Duncan
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780691175072
- eISBN:
- 9780691194189
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691175072.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter assesses Germaine de Staël's reckoning with the “new genres or sub-genres characteristic of realism,” the Bildungsroman and its British analogues, the Anglo-Irish national tale and ...
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This chapter assesses Germaine de Staël's reckoning with the “new genres or sub-genres characteristic of realism,” the Bildungsroman and its British analogues, the Anglo-Irish national tale and Scottish historical novel, formed in the “novelistic revolution” of European Romanticism. Modeling the scientific conception of human nature as a developmental entity or emergent phenomenon, these new genres or subgenres rehearse a universal formation of species being—a Bildung der Humanität—through the ontogenetic narrative of subject formation. Staël's broad target is the structural exclusion of women from the category that underwrites the new forms of the novel: the Enlightenment's grand universal particular, “man.” And yet, excluded from the new conception of humanity, women were most fully expressive of it. Where men are fixed in a social taxonomy, like animals in the system of nature, women possess the plasticity and fluidity, the capacity to move up and down the scale of being, that are specific markers of the human in late Enlightenment anthropology.Less
This chapter assesses Germaine de Staël's reckoning with the “new genres or sub-genres characteristic of realism,” the Bildungsroman and its British analogues, the Anglo-Irish national tale and Scottish historical novel, formed in the “novelistic revolution” of European Romanticism. Modeling the scientific conception of human nature as a developmental entity or emergent phenomenon, these new genres or subgenres rehearse a universal formation of species being—a Bildung der Humanität—through the ontogenetic narrative of subject formation. Staël's broad target is the structural exclusion of women from the category that underwrites the new forms of the novel: the Enlightenment's grand universal particular, “man.” And yet, excluded from the new conception of humanity, women were most fully expressive of it. Where men are fixed in a social taxonomy, like animals in the system of nature, women possess the plasticity and fluidity, the capacity to move up and down the scale of being, that are specific markers of the human in late Enlightenment anthropology.
Joseph R. Slaughter
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823228171
- eISBN:
- 9780823241033
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823228171.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This study of the historical, ideological, and formal interdependencies of the novel and human rights demonstrates that the twentieth-century rise of world literature and international human rights ...
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This study of the historical, ideological, and formal interdependencies of the novel and human rights demonstrates that the twentieth-century rise of world literature and international human rights law are related phenomena. The author argues that international law shares with the modern novel a particular conception of the human individual. The Bildungsroman, the novel of coming of age, fills out this image, offering a conceptual vocabulary, a humanist social vision, and a narrative grammar for what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and early literary theorists both call the free and full development of the human personality. Revising our received understanding of the relationship between law and literature, the author suggests that this narrative form has acted as a cultural surrogate for the weak executive authority of international law, naturalizing the assumptions and conditions that make human rights appear commonsensical. As a kind of novelistic correlative to human rights law, the Bildungsroman has thus been doing some of the sociocultural work of enforcement that the law cannot do for itself. This analysis of the cultural work of law and of the social work of literature challenges traditional Eurocentric histories of both international law and the dissemination of the novel. Taking his point of departure in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, the author focuses on recent postcolonial versions of the coming-of-age story to show how the promise of human rights becomes legible in narrative and how the novel and the law are complicit in contemporary projects of globalization: in colonialism, neo-imperialism, humanitarianism, and the spread of multinational consumer capitalism.Less
This study of the historical, ideological, and formal interdependencies of the novel and human rights demonstrates that the twentieth-century rise of world literature and international human rights law are related phenomena. The author argues that international law shares with the modern novel a particular conception of the human individual. The Bildungsroman, the novel of coming of age, fills out this image, offering a conceptual vocabulary, a humanist social vision, and a narrative grammar for what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and early literary theorists both call the free and full development of the human personality. Revising our received understanding of the relationship between law and literature, the author suggests that this narrative form has acted as a cultural surrogate for the weak executive authority of international law, naturalizing the assumptions and conditions that make human rights appear commonsensical. As a kind of novelistic correlative to human rights law, the Bildungsroman has thus been doing some of the sociocultural work of enforcement that the law cannot do for itself. This analysis of the cultural work of law and of the social work of literature challenges traditional Eurocentric histories of both international law and the dissemination of the novel. Taking his point of departure in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, the author focuses on recent postcolonial versions of the coming-of-age story to show how the promise of human rights becomes legible in narrative and how the novel and the law are complicit in contemporary projects of globalization: in colonialism, neo-imperialism, humanitarianism, and the spread of multinational consumer capitalism.
Kylee-Anne Hingston
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781789620757
- eISBN:
- 9781789629491
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789620757.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
As a literary fairy tale, Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling Cloak: A Parable for Young and Old (1874) employs a fantasy setting and magical circumstances to depict the ...
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As a literary fairy tale, Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling Cloak: A Parable for Young and Old (1874) employs a fantasy setting and magical circumstances to depict the moral, psychological, and physical development of its hero, Prince Dolor. The hybrid story combines fairy tale, Bildungsroman, and parable, defies conventional narrative closure, and produces incongruous understandings of disability. The story’s narrative trajectory moves towards closure, first reinforcing Dolor’s physical deviance and the eradicating it through magical prosthetic gifts; as such, the outer structure creates a story of disability as abnormal, restricting, and in need of compensation if not cure. However, by making readers aware first of the narrator’s physical limitations and of their own roles as spectators, and then by focalizing through the disabled hero while he is a spectator, The Little Lame Prince undermines its earlier use of Dolor as a sentimental spectacle. Moreover, moments in which readers focalize with Dolor through his magical prostheses reveal the limitations of all bodies and speculate on the beauty and infinite variety of physical difference. These colliding views of disability in The Little Lame Prince exhibit the complex, shifting role of the body in Victorian thought.Less
As a literary fairy tale, Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling Cloak: A Parable for Young and Old (1874) employs a fantasy setting and magical circumstances to depict the moral, psychological, and physical development of its hero, Prince Dolor. The hybrid story combines fairy tale, Bildungsroman, and parable, defies conventional narrative closure, and produces incongruous understandings of disability. The story’s narrative trajectory moves towards closure, first reinforcing Dolor’s physical deviance and the eradicating it through magical prosthetic gifts; as such, the outer structure creates a story of disability as abnormal, restricting, and in need of compensation if not cure. However, by making readers aware first of the narrator’s physical limitations and of their own roles as spectators, and then by focalizing through the disabled hero while he is a spectator, The Little Lame Prince undermines its earlier use of Dolor as a sentimental spectacle. Moreover, moments in which readers focalize with Dolor through his magical prostheses reveal the limitations of all bodies and speculate on the beauty and infinite variety of physical difference. These colliding views of disability in The Little Lame Prince exhibit the complex, shifting role of the body in Victorian thought.
Mary L. Mullen
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474453240
- eISBN:
- 9781474477116
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474453240.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, George Moore’s realist experiments both consolidated a realist movement in England and actively challenged institutions like circulating libraries that ...
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Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, George Moore’s realist experiments both consolidated a realist movement in England and actively challenged institutions like circulating libraries that shaped the development of mid-century realism. But despite Moore’s importance to the institutionalisation of realism in England and the flourishing of naturalism in Ireland, he remains woefully understudied in part because of his performative, often comic, refusal of institutions. This chapter takes this performance seriously as it focuses on his revisions to the realist Bildungsroman in the ‘English’ Esther Waters (1894) and the ‘Irish’ A Drama in Muslin (1886). In both of these novels of development, Moore claims that public institutions and private growth are at odds. A Drama in Muslin adopts an explicitly anachronistic narrative temporality that refuses to allow the protagonist’s individual development to represent national development while Esther Waters validates the protagonist’s stasis over time – her illiteracy despite education. Combining an anti-institutional impulse with an anachronistic narrative temporality, Moore questions the institutionalised assumptions of what constitutes proper growth.Less
Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, George Moore’s realist experiments both consolidated a realist movement in England and actively challenged institutions like circulating libraries that shaped the development of mid-century realism. But despite Moore’s importance to the institutionalisation of realism in England and the flourishing of naturalism in Ireland, he remains woefully understudied in part because of his performative, often comic, refusal of institutions. This chapter takes this performance seriously as it focuses on his revisions to the realist Bildungsroman in the ‘English’ Esther Waters (1894) and the ‘Irish’ A Drama in Muslin (1886). In both of these novels of development, Moore claims that public institutions and private growth are at odds. A Drama in Muslin adopts an explicitly anachronistic narrative temporality that refuses to allow the protagonist’s individual development to represent national development while Esther Waters validates the protagonist’s stasis over time – her illiteracy despite education. Combining an anti-institutional impulse with an anachronistic narrative temporality, Moore questions the institutionalised assumptions of what constitutes proper growth.
Matthew L. Reznicek
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781942954323
- eISBN:
- 9781786944320
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781942954323.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter establishes the need for Irish Studies to look beyond the geo-social space of Ireland. By emphasising the central cultural role Paris plays in nineteenth-century literature, it ...
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This chapter establishes the need for Irish Studies to look beyond the geo-social space of Ireland. By emphasising the central cultural role Paris plays in nineteenth-century literature, it demonstrates the significance the city should play in studies of nineteenth-century Irish literature. This focus on Paris establishes the book’s key lines of inquiry: the connection between the city, economics, self-determination, and the capitalist Bildungsroman.Less
This chapter establishes the need for Irish Studies to look beyond the geo-social space of Ireland. By emphasising the central cultural role Paris plays in nineteenth-century literature, it demonstrates the significance the city should play in studies of nineteenth-century Irish literature. This focus on Paris establishes the book’s key lines of inquiry: the connection between the city, economics, self-determination, and the capitalist Bildungsroman.
Elisha Cohn
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780190250041
- eISBN:
- 9780190250065
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190250041.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book rethinks the nineteenth-century aesthetics of agency through the Victorian novel’s fascination with states of reverie, trance, and sleep. These states challenge contemporary scientific and ...
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This book rethinks the nineteenth-century aesthetics of agency through the Victorian novel’s fascination with states of reverie, trance, and sleep. These states challenge contemporary scientific and philosophical accounts of the perfectibility of the self, which privileged reflective self-awareness. In dialogue with the field of literature and science studies and affect studies, this book shows how Victorian writers used narrative form to respond to the analytical practices and knowledge production of those other disciplines. Drawing upon canonical texts—by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy—Still Life contends that depictions of non-purposive perceptual experience suspend the processes of self-cultivation (Bildung) central to Victorian aesthetics, science, psychology, and political theory, as well as most critical accounts of the novel form. Departing from the values of individual cultivation and moral revelation associated with the genre, these writers offer an affective framework for understanding the subtly non-instrumental powers of narrative. Victorian novels ostensibly working within the parameters of the Bildungsroman are suspended by moments of “still life”: a lyricism associated with states of diminished consciousness. They use this style to narrate what should be unnarratable: experiences not dependent on reflective consciousness, which express a distinctive ambivalence toward dominant developmental frameworks of individual self-culture.Less
This book rethinks the nineteenth-century aesthetics of agency through the Victorian novel’s fascination with states of reverie, trance, and sleep. These states challenge contemporary scientific and philosophical accounts of the perfectibility of the self, which privileged reflective self-awareness. In dialogue with the field of literature and science studies and affect studies, this book shows how Victorian writers used narrative form to respond to the analytical practices and knowledge production of those other disciplines. Drawing upon canonical texts—by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy—Still Life contends that depictions of non-purposive perceptual experience suspend the processes of self-cultivation (Bildung) central to Victorian aesthetics, science, psychology, and political theory, as well as most critical accounts of the novel form. Departing from the values of individual cultivation and moral revelation associated with the genre, these writers offer an affective framework for understanding the subtly non-instrumental powers of narrative. Victorian novels ostensibly working within the parameters of the Bildungsroman are suspended by moments of “still life”: a lyricism associated with states of diminished consciousness. They use this style to narrate what should be unnarratable: experiences not dependent on reflective consciousness, which express a distinctive ambivalence toward dominant developmental frameworks of individual self-culture.
