Formative Fictions : Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman / Tobias Boes.

By: Contributor(s): Material type: TextTextSeries: Signale : modern German letters, cultures, and thought | Book collections on Project MUSEPublisher: Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press : 2012Manufacturer: Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2014Copyright date: ©2012Description: 1 online resource (214 pages)Content type:
  • text
Media type:
  • computer
Carrier type:
  • online resource
ISBN:
  • 9780801465215
Subject(s): Genre/Form: Online resources:
Contents:
The limits of national form : normativity and performativity in Bildungsroman criticism -- Apprenticeship of the novel : Goethe and the invention of history -- Epigonal consciousness : Stendhal, Immermann, and the "problem of generations" around 1830 -- Long-distance fantasies : Freytag, Eliot, and national literature in the age of empire -- Urban vernaculars : Joyce, Döblin, and the "individuating rhythm" of modernity -- Conclusion : apocalipsis cum figuris : Thomas Mann and the Bildungsroman at the ends of time.
Summary: 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. In 'Formative Fictions', Tobias Boes 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 Boes 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.
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The limits of national form : normativity and performativity in Bildungsroman criticism -- Apprenticeship of the novel : Goethe and the invention of history -- Epigonal consciousness : Stendhal, Immermann, and the "problem of generations" around 1830 -- Long-distance fantasies : Freytag, Eliot, and national literature in the age of empire -- Urban vernaculars : Joyce, Döblin, and the "individuating rhythm" of modernity -- Conclusion : apocalipsis cum figuris : Thomas Mann and the Bildungsroman at the ends of time.

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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. In 'Formative Fictions', Tobias Boes 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 Boes 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.

In English.

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