The Modernist Bildungsroman

Recent work in Victorian studies and the bildungsroman

“…Cohn's account of Victorian bildung collapses two concepts that Gregory Castle's Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman () usefully prises apart. Castle suggests first that there are two distinct traditions of bildung within German Romanticism: the first, associated with Goethe, was more mystical, elitist, and invested in the arts as a touchstone for self‐cultivation; the second, associated with Wilhelm von Humboldt, was more practical, democratically minded, and preoccupied with education as a mechanism of personal development (p. 34–47).…”

The Art of Adaptation in Film and Video Games

“…Quoted from "Historical Silence," Petzold's essay in the DVD brochure 20. Cited in(Castle 2006), Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman, p. 36 21. Cited in(Castle 2006, p. 36).…”

Dying to Live: British Idealism and the Bildungsroman

“…10 In voicing their protests against "the Bildungsroman as the quintessential narrative of the sovereign and autonomous, harmoniously self-identical subject of Bildung," Castle argues, modernist authors invented a practice of writing that anticipates Theodor Adorno's "negative dialectics," reworking the formal conventions of the bildungsroman to make room for nonidentity as such (i.e., an "other" that cannot immediately be integrated into the "same"). 11 In doing so, however, these authors retained the core elements (plot trajectory, characterization, thematic emphases) of the genre, thus reinstating "a revalued classical Bildung"-now in principle made available to those (like women and the formerly colonized) whom the classical bildungsroman had marked as other-as "the goal of the modernist Bildungsheld " (protagonist). 12 Pater's and Ward's novels, however, suggest that Castle is being overpunctual in assigning the critique of bildungsroman to "modernism," as well as overhasty in his identification of the aesthetic and political dimensions of this critique.…”

“…11 In doing so, however, these authors retained the core elements (plot trajectory, characterization, thematic emphases) of the genre, thus reinstating "a revalued classical Bildung"-now in principle made available to those (like women and the formerly colonized) whom the classical bildungsroman had marked as other-as "the goal of the modernist Bildungsheld " (protagonist). 12 Pater's and Ward's novels, however, suggest that Castle is being overpunctual in assigning the critique of bildungsroman to "modernism," as well as overhasty in his identification of the aesthetic and political dimensions of this critique. At least a decade before Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce, Pater and Ward explored another and perhaps more intractable threat to the sovereignty and self-identity of the subject of bildung: death.…”